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HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 


No. 93 


Editors: 


HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. 
Pror. GILBERT MURRAY, LitT.D., 
LL.D., F.B.A. 


Pror. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. 
Pror. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. 


THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 


16mo cloth, 50 cents net, postpaid 
LITERATURE AND ART 
Already Published 


SHAKESPEARE ...... . . By JoHNn Maserierp 
ENGLISH LITERATURE— 

MODERINM Aimar ctr ten sillatiioltc nemisy Geret a MATE 
ENGLISH LITERATURE— 

MEDIEVAL. . “A eet ey Wes SER, 
LANDMARKS IN FRENCH 

LIT BRAT URED cscs tele en by Gil. STRACHEY 
ARCHITECTURE, (3 0. % By W. R. Lereasy 


THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. . By L. PEArsatt SmitH 
WRITING ENGLISH PROSE . . By W. T. Brewster 


GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS . By W. P. Trent and Joun 
ERSKINE 


DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE By Joun Battery 


THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LIT- 
RCA SE RAE ei imeiremiatitetie tee cikes . By G, K. CHEsTERTON 


THE Re OF GER- 
LAIN Yeh tev net re they beoreate - « « « By J. G. Rozertson 


eee AND PAINTING .. By FrepericK WEDMORE 
See ee GODWIN, AND THEIR 


CIR CUI PST ae ierie ioe Wear et retin By H. N. Braitsrorp 
ANCE ART AND RITUAL . By Miss Jane Harrison 
EURIPIDES AND HIS AGE... By Gitserr Murray 


CHAUCER AND HIS TIMES .. By Miss G. E. Hapow 


WILLIAM MORRIS: HIS WORK 
AND MUNELUENCHE i. severe By A. C. Brock 


THEGRENATSSAN CE ase) cmeweue By Epiru SicHer 
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE . By J. M. Robertson 


Future Issues 


ITALIAN ART OF THE RENAIS- 
SANCE . . By Rocer E. Fry 


SCANDINAVIAN HISTORY AND 


O08: Ole Od \0) OP Ole ec ee ene: 


EITERATURE 2.75 es ee Byad aC aONOW. 
HISTORY -AND LATER ATURE 

OPMSBALNGH Wy tae ree . .. By J. Frrzmavrice-Ketty 
PATINGLIVERATURE 2) oe. << By J. S. PHiLitimore 

SE RARE aCAS DBS aye hou eesti By Tuomas SECCOMBE 


GREAT WRITERS OF RUSSIA . By C. T. Hacserc Wricut 
MIERO NU etn.) Buds Wagt AF o Na thes Jeux BatLey 


AN OUTLINE OF 
RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


BY 


MAURICE BARING 


AUTHOR OF 
“WITH THE RUSSIANS IN MANCHURIA,’’ “‘A YEAR IN RUSSIA,”’ 
““ THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE,’’ ETC. 





NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
LONDON 
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 





PREFACE 


Tue chief difficulty which Englishmen have 
experienced in writing about Russia has, up 
till quite lately, been the prevailing ignorance 
of the English public with regard to all that 
concerns Russian affairs. A singularly in- 
telligent Russian, who is connected with the 
Art Theatre at Moscow, said to me that he 
feared the new interest taken by English 
intellectuals with regard to Russian literature 
and Russian art. He was delighted, of course, 
that they should be interested in Russian 
affairs, but he feared their interest was in 
danger of being crystallized in a false shape 
and directed into erroneous channels. 

This ignorance will always remain until 
English people go to Russia and learn to 
know the Russian people at first hand. It 
is not enough to be acquainted with a certain 
number of Russian writers; I say a certain 


number advisedly, because, although it is true 
Vv 


vi PREFACE 


that such writers as Tolstoy and Turgenev 
have long been naturalized in England, it is 
equally true that some of the greatest and 
most typical of Russian authors have not yet 
been translated. 

There is in England no complete trans- 
lation of Pushkin. This is much the same 
as though there were in Russia no complete 
translation of Shakespeare or Milton. I do 
not mean by this that Pushkin is as great a 
poet as Shakespeare or Milton, but I do mean 
that he is the most national and the most 
important of all Russian writers. There is 
no translation of Saltykov, the greatest of 
Russian satirists; there is no complete trans- 
lation of Leskov, one of her greatest novelists, 
while Russian criticism and philosophy, as 
well as almost the whole of Russian poetry, is 
completely beyond the ken of England. The 
knowledge of what Russian civilisation, with 
its glorious fruit of literature, consists in, is still 
a sealed book so far as England is concerned. 


M. B. 


CONTENTS 


CHAP. PAGE 
I THE ORIGINS : : : : : 9 
II THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN : : sie oO) 

III LERMONTOY . ‘ A : } Beal OL 
IV THE AGE OF PROSE : 2 “ #126 
Vv THE EPOCH OF REFORM : x welog 
VI TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY . é EY 

VII THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY, . 226 

CONCLUSION : fs 4 4 . 243 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE , Been 
INDEX ‘ * 5 - 5 . 254 





AN OUTLINE OF 
RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


CHAPTER I 
THE ORIGINS 


For the purposes of the average Russian, 
and still more for the purposes of the foreigner, 
Russian literature begins with the nineteenth 
century, that is to say with the reign of 
Alexander I. It was then that the literary 
fruits on which Russia has since fed were 
born. The seeds were sown, of course, 
centuries earlier; but the history of Russian 
literature up to the nineteenth century is not 
a history of literature, it is the history of 
Russia. It may well be objected that it is 
difficult to separate Russian literature from 
Russian history; that for the understanding 
of Russian literature an understanding of 
Russian history is indispensable. This is 


probably true; but, in a sketch of this dimen- 
9 


10 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


sion, it would be quite impossible to give even 
an adequate outline of all the vicissitudes in 
the life of the Russian people which have 
helped and hindered, blighted and fostered 
the growth of the Russian tree of letters. 
All that one can do is to mention some of 
the chief landmarks amongst the events which 
directly affected the growth of Russian 
literature until the dawn of that epoch when 
its fruits became palpable to Russia and to 
the world. 

The first of these facts is the existence of 
a Slav race on the banks of the Dnieper in 
the seventh and eighth centuries, and the 
growth of cities and trade centres such as 
Kiev, Smolensk, and Novgorod, which seem 
already to have been considerable settlements 
when the earliest Russian records were 
written. Of these, from the point of view 
of literature, Kiev was the most important. 
Kiev on the Dnieper was the mother of 
Russian culture; Moscow and St. Petersburg 
became afterwards the heirs of Kiev. 

Another factor of vital historical import- 
ance which had an indirect effect on the his- 
tory of Russian literature was the coming of 
the Norsemen into Russia at the beginning of 


THE ORIGINS 11 


the ninth century. They came as armed mer- 
chants from Scandinavia; they founded and 
organized principalities; they took Novgorod 
and Kiev. The Scandinavian Viking became 
the Russian Kniaz, and the Varanger princi- 
pality of Kiev became the kernel of the Russian 
State. In the course of time, the Norsemen 
became merged in the Slavs, but left traces 
of their origin in the Sagas, the Byliny, which 
spread from Kiev all over Russia, and still 
survive in some distant governments. Hence 
the Norse names Oleg (Helgi), Olga (Helga), 
Igor (Ingvar). The word Russian, Rus, the 
origin and etymology of which are shrouded 
in obscurity, was first applied to the men-at- 
arms who formed the higher class of society 
in the early Varanger states. 

The next determining factor in the early 
history of Russian literature is the Church. 
Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, married the sister 
of the Emperor of Byzantium and was bap- 
tized; henceforward Christianity began to 
spread (987-8), but the momentous fact is 
that it was the Christianity of the East. The 
pearl of the Gospels, says Soloviev, was 
covered over with the dust of Byzantium, 
and Russia was committed to the Greek 


12 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


tradition, the Greek rivalry with the West, 
and was consequently excluded from the 
civilization of the West and the great intel- 
lectual community of which Rome was the 
centre. This fact is of far-reaching and 
momentous importance. No less important 
was the introduction of the Slavonic liturgy, 
which was invented by two Greek brothers 
from Saloniki, in the ninth century, who 
tried to force their Macedonian dialect on 
all the Slavs, and succeeded in the case 
of Bulgaria and Servia. A century or so 
later it reached the Russian Slavs. Through 
Bulgaria, the Russians acquired a ready- 
made literature and a written language in a 
dialect which was partly Bulgarian and 
partly Macedonian, or rather Macedonian 
with Bulgarian modifications. The posses- 
sion of a written language acted as a lever 
as far as culture was concerned. In the 
eleventh century, Kiev was one of the most 
enlightened cities in Europe. 

The rulers of Kiev were at this time related 
to the Kings of France, Hungary, Norway, 
and even England. The Russian MSS. of the 
eleventh century equal the best MSS. of 
Western Europe of the same period. The 


THE ORIGINS 13 


city of Kiev was a home of wealth, learning, 
and art. Byzantine artists went to Kiev, 
and Kiev sent Russian painters to the West. 
There seemed at this time to be no barrier 
between East and West. Nothing could be 
more promising than such a beginning; but the 
course of Russian history was not destined to 
run smooth. In the middle of the eleventh 
century, the foundations of a durable barrier 
between Russia and Western Europe were 
laid. This was brought about by the schism 
of the Eastern and Western Churches. The 
schism arose out of the immemorial rivalry 
between the Greeks and the Latins, a rivalry 
which ever since then has continued to exist 
between Rome and Byzantium. The Slavs, 
whom the matter did not concern, and who 
were naturally tolerant, were the victims of 
a racial hatred and a rivalry wholly alien 
to them. It may seem unnecessary to dwell 
upon what some may regard as an ancient 
and trivial ecclesiastical dispute. But, in 
its effects and in its results, this ‘‘ Querelle 
de Moine,”’ as Leo X said when he heard of 
Luther’s action, was as momentous for the 
East as the Reformation was for the West. 
Sir Charles Eliot says the schism of the 


14 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


Churches ranks in importance with the 
foundation of Constantinople and the Corona- 
tion of Charlemagne as one of the turning 
points in the relations of West and East. He 
says that for the East it was of doleful import, 
since it prevented the two great divisions 
from combining against the common enemy, 
the Turk. It was of still more doleful import 
for Russia, for the schism erected a barrier, 
which soon became formidable, between it 
and the civilizing influences of Western 
Kurope. 

But in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, 
the existence of this growing barrier was not 
yet perceptible. The eleventh and twelfth 
centuries in Russia were an age of Sagas and 
‘“‘ Byliny,” already clearly stamped with the 
democratic character and ideal that is at 
the root of all Russian literature, and which © 
offer so sharp a contrast to Greek and 
Western ideals. In the Russian Sagas, the 
most popular hero is the peasant’s son, who 
is despised and rejected, but at the critical 
moment displays superhuman strength and 
saves his country from the enemy; and in 
return for his services is allowed to drink his 
fill for three years in a tavern. 


THE ORIGINS 15 


But by far the most interesting remains of 
the literature of Kiev which have reached 
posterity are the Chronicle of Kiev, often 
called the Chronicle of Nestor, finished at the 
beginning of the twelfth century, and the Story 
of the Raid of Prince Igor. The Chronicle of 
Kiev, written in a cloister, rich in that epic 
detail and democratic quality that charac- 
terize the Sagas, is the basis of all later 
chronicles dealing with the early history of 
Russia. The Story of the Raid of Prince Igor, 
which also belongs to the twelfth century, a 
prose epic, is not only one of the most re- 
markable memorials of the ancient written 
language of Russia; but by virtue of its 
originality, its historical truth, its vividness, 
it holds a unique place in the literary history 
of Europe, and offers an interesting contrast 
to the Chanson de Roland. 

The Story of the Raid of Igor tells of an 
expedition made in the year 1185 against the 
Polovtsy, a tribe of nomads, by Igor the son 
of Sviatoslav, Prince of Novgorod, together 
with other Princes. The story tells how the 
Princes set out and raid the enemy’s country ; 
how, successful at first, they are attacked by 
overwhelming numbers and defeated; how 


16 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


Igor is taken prisoner; and how in the end 
he escapes and returns home. The story is 
written in rhythmical prose, with passages 
where the rhythm has a more strongly 
accentuated quality as of unrhymed verse. 
All the incidents recorded in the epic agree 
in every respect with the narrative of the 
same events which is to be found in the 
Chronicle of Kiev. It is only the manner of 
presenting them which is different. What 
gives the epic a unique interest is that the 
author must indubitably have belonged to 
the militia of Sviatoslav, Grand Duke of 
Kiev; and, if he was not an eye-witness of 
the events he describes with such wealth of 
detail, his knowledge was at any rate first- 
hand and intimate. 

But the epic is as remarkable for the quality 
of its style as it is for the historical interest of . 
its subject-matter. It plunges, after a short 
introduction, in medias res, and the narrative 
ss concentrated on the dramatic moments 
which give rise to the expression of lyrical 
feeling, pathos and description—such as the 
battle, the defeat, the ominous dream of the 
Grand Duke, and the lament of the wife of 
Igor on the walls of Putivl— 


THE ORIGINS 17 


“T will fly ’—she says— 
** Like the cuckoo down the Don; 
I will wet my beaver sleeve 
In the river Kayala; 
I will wash the bleeding wounds of the Prince, 
The wounds of his ee eg 


a 0 Wind, little Na 

Why, Sir, 

Why do you blow so fiercely ? 

Why, on your light wings 

Do you blow the arrows of the robbers against 
my husband’s warriors ? 

‘Is it not enough for you to blow high beneath 
the clouds, 

To rock the ships on the blue sea? 

Why, Sir, have you scattered my joy on the 
grassy plain? ” 


Throughout the poem, Nature plays an 
active part in the events. When Igor is 
defeated, the grasses bend with pity and the 
trees are bowed to the earth with grief. 
When Igor escapes, he talks with the river 
Don as le fords it, and when the bandits 
follow him, the woodpeckers tell them the 
way with their tapping. The poem, which 

B 


18 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


contains much lamentation over the quarrels 
of the Princes and the injury ensuing from 
them to the Russian people, ends in the 
major key. Igor is restored to his native 
soil, he goes to Kiev to give thanks in the 
Church, and the people acclaim the old 
Princes and then the young Princes with 
song. 

A transcript of the poem, made probably 
at the end of the fourteenth century, was 
first discovered in 1795 by Count Musin- 
Pushkin, and first published in 1800, when it 
made the same kind of impression as the 
publication of the Songs of Ossian. It was 
not, however, open to Dr. Johnson’s objec- 
tion—‘‘ Show me the originals ”’—for the 
fourteenth century transcript of the original 
then existed and was inspected and considered 
unmistakably genuine by Karamzin and 
others, but was unfortunately burnt in the 
fire of Moscow.1 The poem has been trans- 
lated into English, French and German, and 
has given rise to a whole literature of com- 
mentaries. “ 

_ 7} Another copy of it was found in 1864 hmongst the 


papers of Catherine I. Pushkin left a remarkable analysis 
of the epic. 


THE ORIGINS 19 


Up to the twelfth century, Russian life 
was concentrated in the splendid and _pro- 
sperous centre of Kiev; but in the thirteenth 
century came a crushing blow which was 
destined to set back the clock of Russian 
culture for three hundred years, namely, the 
Tartar invasion. Kiev was destroyed in 
1240. After this, the South was abandoned; 
Lithuania and Poland became entirely separ- 
ated from the East; the Eastern principalities 
centred round Moscow; the Metropolitan of 
Kiev transferred his see to Moscow in 13828; 
and by the fourteenth century Moscow had 
taken the place of Kiev, and had become the 
kernel of Russian life and culture. Russia 
under the dominion of the Tartar yoke was 
intellectually stagnant. The Church alone 
retained its independence, and when Con- 
stantinople fell, Moscow declared itself to be 
the third and last Rome: but the inde- 
pendence of the Church, although it kept 
national feeling alive under the Tartar yoke, 
made for stagnation rather than progress, 
and the barrier between Russia and the 
culture of the West was now solid and visible. 

From the fourteenth century until the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, Russian 


20 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


literature, instead of being a panorama of 
various and equally splendid periods of 
production, such as the Elizabethan epoch, 
the Jacobean epoch, and the Georgian epoch, 
or, as in France, the Renaissance, the Grand 
Siécle, and the philosophic era of the eight- 
eenth century, has nothing to show at all. 
to the outward world; for during all this 
time the soil from which it was to grow 
was merely being prepared, and gradually, 
with difficulty and delay, gaining access to 
such influences as would make any growth 
possible. All that is important, as far as 
literature is concerned, in this period, are 
those events and factors which had the effect 
of making breaches in the wall which shut 
Russia off from the rest of Europe; in letting 
in that light which was necessary for any 
literary plants to grow, and in removing those 
obstacles which prevented Russia from enjoy- 
ing her rightful heritage among the rest of her 
sister European nations: a heritage which 
she had well employed in earlier days, and 
which she had lost for a time owing to the 
barbarian invasion. 

The first event which made a breach in the 
wall was the marriage of Ivan III, Tsar of 


THE ORIGINS 21 


Moscow, to Sophia Palzeologa, the niece of the 
last of the Byzantine Emperors. She brought 
with her Italian architects and other foreigners, 
and the work of Peter the Great, of opening 
a window in Russia on to Europe, was begun. 

The first printing press was established in 
Moscow during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, 
and the first book was printed in 1564. But 
literature was still under the direct control 
of the Church, and the Church looked upon 
all innovations and all foreign learning with 
the deepest mistrust. At the beginning of 
the seventeenth century, Peter the Great 
had a strange forerunner in the shape of that 
enigmatic historical personage, the false 
Demetrius, who claimed to be the murdered 
son of Ivan the Terrible, and who, in spite 
of his western ideas, Polish manners, and 
Latin culture, succeeded in occupying the 
throne of Moscow for a year. His ideal was 
one of progress; but he came too soon, and 
paid for his prematurity with his life. 

But it was from Kiev and Poland that the 
fruitful winds of enlightenment were next to 
blow. Kiev, re-risen from its ruins and re- 
covered from its long slumber, became a 
centre of learning, and possessed a college 


22 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


whose curriculum was modelled on the Jesuit 
schools; and although Moscow looked upon 
Kiev with mistrust, an imperative demand for 
schools arose in Moscow. In the meantime a 
religious question had arisen fraught with 
consequences for Russia: namely that of the 
revision of the Liturgical books, into the text 
of which, after continuous copying and re- 
copying, errors had crept. The demand for 
revision met with great opposition, and ended 
ultimately in producing a great schism in the 
Russian Church, which has never been healed. 
But, with the exception of the Little Russians, 
there was no one at Moscow capable of pre- 
paring texts for printing or of conducting 
schools. The demand for schools and the 
decision to revise the texts were simul- 
taneous. The revision was carried out be- 
tween 1653-7, and a migration of Kiev scholars 
to Moscow came about at the same time. In 
1665 Latin was taught in Moscow by SimEon 
PoLotTsKy, who was the first Russian verse- 
maker. It is impossible to call him a poet; 
he wrote what was called syllabic verse: the 
number of syllables taking the place of rhythm. 
As a pioneer of culture, he deserves fame; but 
in the interest of literature, it was a misfortune 


THE ORIGINS 28 


that his tradition was followed until the 
middle of the eighteenth century. 

In the latter half of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, another influence besides that of Kiev 
and Poland made itself felt. A fresh breach 
in the wall came from another quarter. The 
German suburb in Moscow in the seventeenth 
century, called the Sloboda, became a centre 
of European culture. Here dwelt the foreign 
officers and soldiers, capitalists and artisans, 
who brought with them the technical skill 
and the culture of Western Europe. It was 
here that the Russian stage was born. The 
Protestant pastor of the Sloboda, Gregory, 
was commanded to write a comedy by the 
Tsar Alexis, in 1672, on the occasion of the 
birth of the Tsarevitch. A theatre was built 
in the village of Preobrazhenskoe (Transfigura- 
tion), and a play on the subject of Esther and 
Ahasuerus was produced there. It was here 
also in 1674 that the ballet was introduced. 
A regular company was formed; several 
plays translated from the German were pro- 
duced, and the first original play written in 
Russia was The Prodigal Son, by Simeon 
Polotsky. 

Thus, at the end of the seventeenth century, 


24 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


Russia was ready for any one who should 
be able to give a decisive blow to the 
now crumbling wall between herself and the 
West. For, by the end of the seventeenth 
century, Russia, after having been centralized 
in Moscow by Ivan III, and enlarged by 
Ivan IV, had thrown off the Tartar yoke. 
She had passed through a period of intestine 
strife, trouble, anarchy, and pretenders, not 
unlike the Wars of the Roses; she had fought 
Poland throughout the whole of the seven- 
teenth century, from her darkest hour of 
anarchy, when the Poles occupied Moscow. 
It was then that Russia had arisen, expelled 
the invaders, reasserted her nationality and 
her independence, and finally emerged out 
of all these vicissitudes, the great Slavonic 
state; while Poland, Russia’s superior in 
culture and civilization, had sunk into the 
position of a dependency. 

The man whom the epoch needed was forth- 
coming. His name was Peter. He carried 
on the work which had been begun, but in 
quite an original manner, and gave it a 
different character. He not only made a 
breach in the wall, but he forced on his 
stubborn and conservative subjects the habits 


THE ORIGINS 25 


and customs of the West. He revolutionized 
the government and the Church, and turned 
the whole country upside down with his 
explosive genius. He abolished the Russian 
Patriarchate, and crushed the power of the 
Church once and for all, by making it en- 
tirely depend on the State, as it still does. 
He simplified the Russian script and the 
written language; he caused to be made 
innumerable translations of foreign works on 
history, geography, and jurisprudence. He 
founded the first Russian newspaper. But 
Peter the Great did not try to draw Russia 
into an alien path; he urged his country with 
whip, kick, and spur to regain its due place, 
which it had lost by lagging behind, on the 
path it was naturally following. Peter the 
Great’s reforms, his manifold and _ super- 
human activity, produced no immediate fruits 
in literature. How could it? To blame him 
for this would be like blaming a gardener for 
not producing new roses at a time when he 
was relaying the garden. He was completely 
successful in opening a window on to Europe, 
through which Western influence could stream 
into Russia. This was not slow in coming 
about; and the foreign influence from the end 


26 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


of the reign of Peter the Great onwards divided 
directly into’ two different currents: the 
French and the German. The chief repre- 
sentatives of the German influence in the 
eighteenth century were TaTisHcHEv, the . 
founder of Russian history, and MicHarL 
Lomonosov. 

Michael Lomonosov (1714-1765), a man 
with an incredibly wide intellectual range, 
was a mathematician, a chemist, an astro- 
nomer, a political economist, a historian, an 
electrician, a geologist, a grammarian and 
a poet. The son of a peasant, after an 
education acquired painfully in the greatest 
privation, he studied at Marburg and Frei- 
burg. He was the Peter the Great of the 
Russian language; he scratched off the crust 
of foreign barbarisms, and still more by his 
example than his precepts—which were pe- 
dantic—he displayed it in its native purity, 
and left it as an instrument ready tuned for 
a great player. He fought for knowledge, 
and did all he could to further the founding 
of the University of Moscow, which was done 
in 1755 by the Empress Elizabeth. This last 
event is one of the most important landmarks 
in the history of Russian culture. 


THE ORIGINS 27 


The foremost representative of French 
influence was Prince KantTemir (1708-44), 
who wrote the first Russian literary verse— 
satires—in the pseudo-classic French manner, 
modelled on Boileau. But by far the most 
abundant source of French ideas in Russia 
during the eighteenth century was Catherine 
II, the German Princess. During Catherine’s 
reign, French influence was predominant in 
Russia. The Empress was the friend of 
Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot. Diderot 
came to St. Petersburg,’ and the Russian 
military schools were flooded with French 
teachers. Voltaire and Rousseau were the 
fashion, and cultured society was platonically 
enamoured of the Rights of Man. Catherine 
herself, besides being a great ruler and diplo- 
matist, was a large-minded philosopher, an 
elegant and witty writer. But the French 
Revolution had a damping effect on all liberal 
enthusiasm, for the one thing an autocrat, 
however enlightened, finds difficulty in under- 
standing, is a revolution. 

This change of point of view proved dis- 
astrous for the writer of what is the most 
thoughtful book of the age: namely Rapt- 
SHCHEV, an official who wrote a book in twenty- 


28 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


five chapters called A Journey from St. 
Petersburg to Moscow. Radishchev gave a. 
simple and true account of the effects of serf- 
dom, a series of pictures drawn without 
exaggeration, showing the appalling evils of . 
the system, and appealing to the conscience 
of the slave-owners; the book contained 
also a condemnation of the Censorship. It 
appeared in 1790, with the permission of the 
police. It was too late for the times; for in 
1790 the events in France were making all 
the rulers of Europe pensive. Radishchev was 
accused of being a rebel, and was condemned 
to death. The sentence was commuted to 
one of banishment to Eastern Siberia. He was 
pardoned by the Emperor Paul, and reinstated 
by the Emperor Alexander; but he ultimately 
committed suicide on being threatened in jest 
with exile once more. Until 1905 it was very — 
difficult to get a copy of this book. Thus 
Radishchev stands out as the martyr of Rus- 
sian literature; the first writer to suffer for 
expressing opinions at the wrong moment : 
opinions which had they been stated in this 
case twenty years sooner would have coincided 
with those published by the Empress herself. 

Catherine’s reign, which left behind it many 


THE ORIGINS 29 


splendid results, and had the effect of be- 
stowing European culture on Russia, pro- 
duced hardly a single poet or prose-writer 
whose work can be read with pleasure to-day, 
although a great importance was attached to 
the writing of verse. There were poets in 
profusion, especially writers of Odes, the best 
known of whom was DERZHAVIN (1743-1816), 
a brilliant master of the pseudo-classical, in 
whose work, in spite of its antiquated con- 
vention, elements of real poetical beauty are 
to be found, which entitle him to be called the 
first Russian poet. But so far no national 
literature had been produced. French was 
the language of the cultured classes. Litera- 
ture had become an artificial plaything, to be 
played with according to French rules; but 
the Russian language was waiting there, a 
language which possessed, as Lomonosov 
said, ‘‘ the vivacity of French, the strength of 
German, the softness of Italian, the richness 
-and powerful conciseness of Greek and Latin ” 
—waiting for some one who should have the 
desire and the power to use it. 


CHAPTER II 
THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 


Tue value of Russian literature, its peculiar 
and unique message to the world, would not 
be sensibly diminished, had everything it 
produced from the twelfth to the beginning 
of the nineteenth century perished, with.the 
exception of The Raid of Prince Igor. With 
the beginning of the nineteenth century, 
and the accession of Alexander I, the New 
Age began, and the real dawn of Russian 
literature broke. It was soon to be followed 
by a glorious sunrise. The literature which 
sprang up now and later, was profoundly 
affected by public events; and public events 
during this epoch were intimately linked with 
the events which were happening in Western 
Kurope. It was the epoch of the Napoleonic 
wars, and Russia played a vital part in that 
drama. Public opinion, after enthusiasm had 


been roused by the deeds of Suvorov, was 
30 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN © 31 


exasperated and humiliated by Napoleon’s 
subsequent victories over Russian arms. But 
when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812, a 
wave of patriotism swept over the country, 
and the struggle resulted in an increased sense 
of unity and nationality. Russia emerged 
stronger and more solid from the struggle. 
As far as foreign affairs were concerned, 
the Emperor Alexander I—on whom every- 
thing depended—played his national part 
well, and he fitly embodied the patriotic 
movement of the day. At the beginning of 
his reign he raised great hopes of internal 
reform which were never fulfilled. He was 
a dreamer of dreams born out of his due time; 
a pupil of La Harpe, the Swiss Jacobin, who 
instilled into him aspirations towards liberty, 
truth and humanity, which throughout re- 
mained his ideals, but which were too vague 
to lead to anything practical or definite. His 
reign was thus a series of more or less 
undefined and fitful struggles to put the 
crooked straight. He desired to give Russia 
a constitution, but the attempts he made to 
do so proved fruitless; and towards the end 
of his life he is said to have been considerably 
influenced by Metternich. It is at any rate 


32 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


_a fact that during these years reaction once 
more triumphed. 

Nevertheless windows had been opened 
which could not be shut, and the light which 
had streamed in produced some remarkable 
fruits. 

When Alexander I came to the throne, the 
immediate effect of his accession was the un- 
gageing of literature, and the first writer of 
importance to take advantage of this new 
state of things was KaRramzin (1726-1826). 
In 1802 he started a new review called the 
Messenger of Europe. This was not his début. 
In the reign of Catherine, Karamzin had been 
brought to Moscow from the provinces, and 
initiated into German and English literature. 
In 1789-90 he travelled abroad and visited 
Switzerland, London and Paris. On _ his 
return, he published his impressions in the | 
shape of ‘“‘ Letters of a Russian Traveller ” 
in the Moscow Journal, which he founded 
himself. His ideals were republican; he was 
an enthusiastic admirer of England and 
the Swiss, and the reforms of Peter the 
Great. But his importance in Russian 
literature lies in his being the first Russian 
to write unstudied, simple and natural prose, 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 33 


Russian as spoken. He published two senti- 
mental stories in his Journal, but the reign 
of Catherine II which now came to an 
end (1796) was followed by a period of un- 
mitigated censorship, which lasted through- 
out the reign of the Emperor Paul, until 
Alexander I came to the throne. The new 
review which Karamzin then started differed 
radically from all preceding Russian reviews 
in that it dealt with politics and made belles 
lettres and criticism a permanent feature. 
As soon as Karamzin had put this review on 
a firm basis, he devoted himself to historical 
research, and the fruit of his work in this 
field was his History of the Russian Dominion, 
in twelve volumes; eight published in 1816, 
the rest in 1821-1826. The Russian language 
was, as has been said, like an instrument wait- 
ing for a great player to play on it, and to make 
use of all its possibilities. Karamzin accom- 
plished this, in the domain of prose. He 
spoke to the Russian heart by speaking 
Russian, pure and unmarred by stilted and 
alien conventionalisms. 

The publication of Karamzin’s history was 
epoch-making. In the first place, the success 


of the work was overwhelming. It was the 
c 


34 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


first time in Russian history that a prose work 
had enjoyed so immense a success. Not only 
were the undreamed-of riches of the Russian 
language revealed to the Russians in the style, 
but the subject-matter came as a surprise. 
Karamzin, as Pushkin put it, revealed Russia 
to the Russians, just as Columbus discovered 
America. He made the dry bones of history 
live, he wrote a great and glowing prose epic. 
His influence on his contemporaries was 
enormous. His work received at once the 
consecration of a classic, and it inspired 
Pushkin with his most important if not his 
finest achievement in dramatic verse (Boris 
Godunov). 

The first Russian poet of national import- 
ance belongs likewise to this epoch, namely 
Krytov (17691-1844), although he had 
written a great deal for the stage in the pre- . 
ceding reigns, and continued to write for a 
long time after the death of Alexander I. 
Krylov is also a Russian classic, of quite a 
different kind. The son of an officer of the 
line, he started by being a clerk in the pro- 
vincial magistrature. Many of his plays 


1 Not 17638, as generally stated in his biographies. 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 35 


were produced with success, though none of 
them had any durable qualities. But it was 
not until 1805 that he found his vocation, 
which was to write fables. The first of these 
were published in 1806 in the Moscow 
Journal; from that time onward he went on 
writing fables until he died in 1844. 

His early fables were translations from La 
Fontaine. They imitate La Fontaine’s free 
versification and they are written in iambics 
of varying length. They were at once success- 
ful, and he continued to translate fables from 
the French, or to adapt from A%sop or other 
sources. But as time went on, he began to 
invent fables of his own; and out of the two 
hundred fables which he left at his death, 
forty only are inspired by La Fontaine and 
seven suggested by Alsop: the remainder 
are original. Krylov’s translations of La 
Fontaine are not so much translations as 
re-creations. He takes the same subject, and 
although often following the original in every 
single incident, he thinks out each motif 
for himself and re-creates it, so that his trans- 
lations have the same personal stamp and 
the same originality as his own inventions. 

This is true even when the original is a 


36 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


masterpiece of the highest order, such as La 
Fontaine’s Deux Pigeons. You would think 
the opening lines— 


** Deux pigeons s’amoient d’amour tendre, 
L’un d’eux s’ennuyant au logis 
Fut assez fou pour entreprendre 
Un voyage en lointain pays ’’— 


were untranslatable; that nothing could be 
subtracted from them, and that still less 
could anything be added; one ray the more, 
one shade the less, you would think, would 
certainly impair their nameless grace. But 
what does Krylov do? He re-creates the 
situation, expanding La Fontaine’s first line 
into six lines, makes it his own, and stamps 
on it the impress of his personality and his 
nationality. Here is a literal translation of 
the Russian, inrhyme. (Iam not ambitiously — 
trying a third English version.) 


““Two pigeons lived like sons born of one 
mother. 
Neither would eat nor drink without the 
other ; 
Where you see one, the other’s surely near, 
And every joy they halved and every tear; 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 37 


They never noticed how the time flew by, 
They sighed, but it was not a weary sigh.” 


This gives the sense of Krylov’s poem word 
for word, except for what is the most import- 
ant touch of all in the last line. The trouble 
is that Krylov has written six lines which 
are as untranslatable as La Fontaine’s four; 
and he has made them as profoundly Russian 
as La Fontaine’s are French. Nothing could 
be more Russian than the last line, which it 
is impossible to translate; because it should 
run— 

“They were sometimes sad, but they never 

felt ennui ”— 


literally, “it was never boring to them.” 
The difficulty is that the word for boring in 
Russian, skuchno, which occurs with the 
utmost felicity in contradistinction to sad, 
grustno, cannot be rendered in English in its 
poetical simplicity. There are no six lines 
more tender, musical, wistful, and subtly 
poetical in the whole of Russian literature. 
Krylov’s fables, like La Fontaine’s, deal with 
animals, birds, fishes and men; the Russian 
peasant plays a large part in them; often 
they are satirical; nearly always they are 


38 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


bubbling with humour. A writer of fables 
is essentially a satirist, whose aim it is 
sometimes to convey pregnant sense, keen 
mockery or scathing criticism in a veiled 
manner, sometimes merely to laugh at human 
foibles, or to express wisdom ‘in the form of 
wit, yet whose aim it always is to amuse. 
But Krylov, though a satirist, succeeded in 
remaining a poet. It has been said that his 
images are conventional and outworn—that 
is to say, he uses the machinery of Zephyrs, 
Nymphs, Gods and Demigods,—and that 
his conceptions are antiquated. But what 
splendid use he makes of this machinery! 
When he speaks of a Zephyr you feel it is 
a Zephyr blowing, for instance, as when 
the ailing cornflower whispers to the breeze. 
Sometimes by the mere sound of his verse 
he conveys a picture, and more than a - 
picture, as in the Fable of the Eagle and 
the Mole, in the first lines of which he 
makes you see and hear the eagle and his 
mate sweeping to the dreaming wood, and 
swooping down on to the oak-tree. Or again, 
in another fable, the Eagle and the Spider, 
he gives in a few words the sense of 
height and space, as if you were looking down 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 39 


from a balloon, when the eagle, soaring over 
the mountains of the Caucasus, sees the end 
of the earth, the rivers meandering in the 
plains, the woods, the meadows in all their 
spring glory, and the angry Caspian Sea, 
darkling like the wing of a raven in the 
distance. But his greatest triumph, in this 
respect, is the fable of the Ass and the Nightin- 
gale, in which the verse echoes the very trills 
of the nightingale, and renders the stillness and 
the delighted awe of the listeners,—the lovers 
and the shepherd. Again a convention, if 
you like, but what a felicitous convention ! 
The fables are discursive like La Fontaine’s, 
and not brief like Ausop’s; but like La Fon- 
taine, Krylov has the gift of summing up a 
situation, of scoring a sharp dramatic effect 
by the sudden evocation of a whole picture in 
a terse phrase: as, for instance, in the fable of 
the Peasants and the River: the peasants go 
to complain to the river of the conduct of the 
streams which are continually overflowing 
and destroying their goods, but when they 
reach the river, they see half their goods 
floating on it. ‘‘ They looked at each other, 
and shaking their heads,” says Krylov, 
** went home.”? The two words “ went home ” 


40 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


in Russian (poshli domoi) express their hope- 
lessness more than pages of rhetoric. This is 
just one of those terse effects such as La 
Fontaine delights in. 
Krylov in his youth lived much among the 
poor, and his language is peculiarly native, 
racy, nervous, and near to the soil. It is the 
language of the people and of the peasants, 
and it abounds in humorous turns. He is, 
moreover, always dramatic, and his fables 
are for this reason most effective when read 
aloud or recited. He is dramatic not only 
in that part of the fable which is narrative, 
but in the prologue, epilogue, or moral—- 
the author’s commentary; he adapts himself 
to the tone of every separate fable, and be- 
comes himself one of the dramatis persone. 
Sometimes. his fables deal with political 
events—the French Revolution, Napoleon’s » 
invasion of Russia, the Congress of Vienna; 
the education of Alexander I by La Harpe, 
in the well-known fable of the Lion who sends 
his son to be educated by the Eagle, of whom 
he consequently learns how to make nests. 
Sometimes they deal with internal evils and 
abuses: the administration of justice, in fables 
such as that of the peasant who brings a 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 41 


case against the sheep and is found guilty 
by the fox; the censorship is aimed at in 
the fable of the nightingale bidden to sing 
in the cat’s claws; the futility of bureau- 
cratic regulations in the fable of the sheep 
who are devoured by their superfluous watch- 
dogs, or in that of the sheep who are told 
solemnly and pompously to drag any offending 
wolf before the nearest magistrate ; or, again, 
in that of the high dignitary who is admitted 
immediately into paradise because on earth 
he left his work to be done by his secretaries— 
for being obviously a fool, had he done his 
work himself, the result would have been 
disastrous to all concerned. Sometimes they 
deal merely with human follies and affairs, 
and the idiosyncrasies of men. 

Krylov’s fables have that special quality 
which only permanent classics possess of 
appealing to different generations, to people 
of every age, kind and class, for different 
reasons; so that children can read them 
simply for the story, and grown-up people for 
their philosophy; their style pleases the 
unlettered by its simplicity, and is the envy 
and despair of the artist in its supreme 
art. Pushkin calls him “le plus national et 


42 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


le plus populaire de nos poétes”’ (this was 
true in Pushkin’s day), and said his fables 
were read by men of letters, merchants, 
men: of the world, servants and children. 
His work bears the stamp of ageless modernity 
just as The Pilgrim’s Progress or Cicero’s 
letters seem modern. It also has the pecu- 
liarly Russian quality of unexaggerated real- 
ism. He sees life as it is, and writes down 
what he sees. It is true that although his 
style is finished and polished, he only at 
times reaches the high-water mark of what 
can be done with the Russian language: his 
style, always idiomatic, pregnant and natural, 
is sometimes heavy, and even clumsy; but 
then he never sets out to be anything more 
than a fabulist. In this he is supremely 
successful, and since at the same time he 
gives us snatches of exquisite poetry, the 
greater the praise to him. But, when all is 
said and done, Krylov has the talisman which 
defies criticism, baffles analysis, and defeats 
time: namely, charm. His fables achieved 
an instantaneous popularity, which has never 
diminished until to-day. 

Internal political events proved the next 
factor in Russian literature; a factor out of 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 43 


which the so-called romantic movement was 
to grow. 

During the Napoleonic wars a great many 
Russian officers had lived abroad. They came 
back to Russia after the Congress of Vienna 
- in 1815, teeming with new ideas and new 
ideals. They took life seriously, and were 
called by Pushkin the Puritans of the North. 
Their aim was culture and the public welfare. 
They were not revolutionaries; on the con- 
trary, they were anxious to co-operate with 
the Government. They formed for their pur- 
pose a society, in imitation of the German 
Tugendbund, called The Society of Welfare: 
its aims were philanthropic, educational, and 
economic. It consisted chiefly of officers of 
the Guard, and its headquarters were at St. 
Petersburg. All this was known and approved 
of by the Emperor. But when the Govern- 
ment became reactionary, this peaceful pro- 
gressive movement changed its character. The 
Society of Welfare was closed in 1821, and its 
place was taken by two new societies, which, 
instead of being political, were social and revo- 
lutionary. The success of the revolutionary 
movements in Spain and in Italy encouraged 
these societies to follow their example. 


44. RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


The death of Alexander I in 1825 forced 
them to immediate action. The shape it took 
was the “‘ Decembrist ” rising. Constantine, 
the Emperor’s brother, renounced his claim to 
the throne, and was succeeded by his brother 
Nicholas. December 14 (O.S.) was fixed 
for the day on which the Emperor should 
receive the oath of allegiance of his troops. 
An organized insurrection took place, which 
was confined to certain regiments. The — 
Emperor was supported by the majority of 
the Guards regiments, and the people showed 
no signs of supporting the rising, which was at 
once suppressed. 

One hundred and twenty-five of the con- 
spirators were condemned. Five of them 
were hanged, and among them the poet 
RYLEEV (1795-1826). But although the 
political. results of the movement were nil,. 
the effect of the movement on literature was 
far-reaching. Philosophy took the place otf 
politics, and liberalism was diverted into 
the channel of romanticism; but out of this 
romantic movement came the spring-tide of 
Russian poetry, in which, for the first time, the 
soul of the Russian people found adequate 
expression. And the very fact that polities 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 45 


were excluded from the movement proved, in 
one: sense, a boon to literature: for it gave 
Russian men of genius the chance to be writers, 
artists and poets, and prevented them from 
exhausting their whole energy in being in- 
efficient politicians or unsuccessful revolu- 
tionaries. I will dwell on the drawbacks, on 
the dark side of the medal, presently. 

As far as the actual Decembrist movement 
is concerned, its concrete and direct legacy 
to literature consists in the work of Ryleev, 
and its indirect legacy in the most famous 
comedy of the Russian stage, Gore otf Uma, 
“The Misfortune of being Clever,” by 
GRIBOYEDOV (1795-1829). 

Ryleev’s life’ was cut short before his 
poetical powers had come to maturity. It is 
idle to speculate what he might have achieved 
had he lived longer. The work which he 
left is notable for its pessimism, but still 
suffers from the old rhetorical conventions 
of the eighteenth century and the imitation 
of French models; moreover he looked on 
literature as a matter of secondary import- 
ance. ‘I am not a poet,” he said, “I am 
a citizen.” In spite of this, every now and 
then there are flashes of intense poetical 


46 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


inspiration in his work; and he struck one 
or two powerful chords—for instance, in his 
stanzas on the vision of enslaved Russia, 
which have a tense strength and fire that 
remind one of Emily Bronté. He was a poet 
as well as a citizen, but even had he lived to 
a prosperous old age and achieved artistic 
perfection in his work, he could never have 
won a brighter aureole than that which his 
death gained him. The poems of his last 
days in prison breathe a spirit of religious 
humility, and he died forgiving and praying 
for his enemies. His name shines in Russian 
history and Russian literature, as that of a 
martyr to a high ideal. 

Griboyedov, the author of Gore ot Uma, a 
writer of a very different order, although not 
a Decembrist himself, is a product of that 
period. His comedy still remains the un- 
surpassed masterpiece of Russian comedy, 
and can be compared with Beaumarchais’ 
Figaro and Sheridan’s School for Scandal. 

Griboyedov was a Foreign Office official, 
and he was murdered when Minister Pleni- 
potentiary at Teheran, on January 380, 1829. 
He conceived the plot of his play in 1816, 
and read aloud some scenes in St. Petersburg 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN A7 


in 1828-24. They caused a sensation in 
literary circles, and the play began to circulate 
rapidly in MSS. Two fragments of the drama 
were published in one of the almanacs, which 
then took the place of literary reviews. But 
beyond this, Griboyedov could neither get 
his play printed nor acted. Thousands of 
copies circulated in MSS., but the play was 
not produced on the stage until 1831, and 
then much mutilated; and it was not printed 
until 1833. 

Gore ot Uma is written in verse, in iambics 
of varying length, like Krylov’s fables. The 
unities are preserved. The action takes place 
in one day and in the same house—that of 
Famusoy, an elderly gentleman of the Moscow 
upper class holding a Government appoint- 
ment. He is a widower and has one daughter, 
Sophia, whose sensibility is greater than her 
sense; and the play opens on a scene where 
the father discovers her talking to his secretary, 
Molchalin, and says he will stand no nonsense. 
Presently, the friend of Sophia’s childhood, 
Chatsky, arrives after a three years’ absence 
abroad; Chatsky is a young man of inde- 
pendent ideas whose misfortune it is to be 
clever. He notices that Sophia receives him 


48 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


coldly, and later on he perceives that she is 
in love with Molchalin,—a wonderfully drawn 
type, the perfect climber, time-server and 
place-seeker, and the incarnation of con- 
vention,—who does not care a rap for Sophia. 
Chatsky declaims to Famusov his contempt 
for modern Moscow, for the slavish. worship 
by society of all that is foreign, for its 
idolatry of fashion and official rank, its 
hollowness and its convention. Famusov, the 
incarnation of respectable conventionality,does 
not understand one word of what he is saying. 
At an evening party given at Famusov’s 
house, Chatsky is determined to find out whom 
Sophia loves. He decides it is Molchalin, and 
lets fall a few biting sarcasms about him to 
Sophia; and Sophia, to pay him back for his 
sarcasm, lets it be understood by one of the 
guests that he is mad. The half-spoken hint 
spreads like lightning; and the spreading of 
the news is depicted in a series of inimitable 
scenes. Chatsky enters while the subject 
is being discussed, and delivers a long tirade 
on the folly of Moscow society, which only 
confirms the suspicions of the guests; and he 
finds when he gets to the end of his speech 
that he is speaking to an empty room. 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 49 


In the fourth act we see the guests leaving 
the house after the party. Chatsky is waiting 
for his carriage. Sophia appears on the stair- 
case and calls Molchalin. Chatsky, hearing 
_ her voice, hides behind a pillar. Liza, Sophia’s 
maid, comes to fetch Molchalin, and knocks at 
hisdoor. Molchalin comes out, and not know- 
ing that Sophia or Chatsky are within hearing, 
makes love to Liza and tells her that he only 
loves Sophia out of duty. Then Sophia ap- 
pears, having heard everything. Molchalin 
falls on his knees to her: she is quite inexor- 
able. Chatsky comes forward and begins to 
speak his mind—when all is interrupted by the 
arrival of Famusov, who speaks his. Chatsky 
shakes the dust of the house and of Moscow 
off his feet, and Sophia is left without Chatsky 
and without Molchalin. 

The Gore ot Uma is a masterpiece of satire 
rather than a masterpiece of dramatic comedy. 
That is to say that, as a satire of the Moscow 
society of the day and of the society of 
yesterday, and of to-morrow, it is immortal, 
and forms a complete work : but as a comedy 
it does not. Almost every scene separately 
is perfect in itself, but dramatically it does 


not group itself round one central idea or 
D 


50 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


one mainspring of action. Judged from the 
point of view of dramatic propriety, the 
behaviour of the hero is wildly improbable 
throughout; there is no reason for the spec- 
tator to think he should be in love with Sophia; 
if he is, there is no reason for him to behave 
as he does; if a man behaved like that, de- 
claiming at an evening party long speeches on 
the decay of the times, the most frivolous of 
societies would be justified in thinking him 
mad. 

Pushkin hit on the weak point of the play 
as a play when he wrote: “In The Mis- 
fortune of being Clever the question arises, 
Who is clever? and the answer is Griboyedov. 
Chatsky is an honourable young man who 
has lived for a long time with a clever man 
(that is to say with Griboyedov), and learnt 
his clever sarcasms; but to whom does he 
say them? To Famusov, to the old ladies 
at the party. This is unforgivable, because 
the first sign of a clever man is to know at 
once whom he is dealing with.”’ 

But what makes the work a masterpiece 
is the naturalness of the characters, the 
dialogue, the comedy of the scenes which 
represent Moscow society. It is extra- 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 51 


ordinary that on so small a scale, in four short 
acts, Griboyedov should have succeeded in 
giving so complete a picture of Moscow 
society, and should have given the dialogue, 
in spite of its being in verse, the stamp of 
_ conversational familiarity. The portraits are 
all full-length portraits, and when the play 
is produced now, the rendering of each part 
raises as much discussion in Russia as a 
revival of one of Sheridan’s comedies in 
England. 

As for the style, nearly three-quarters of 
the play has passed into the Russian language. 
It is forcible, concise, bitingly sarcastic, it is 
as neat and dry as W. S. Gilbert, as elegant 
as La Fontaine, as clear as an icicle, and as 
clean as the thrust of a sword. But perhaps 
the crowning merit of this immortal satire is 
its originality. It is a product of Russian 
life and Russian genius, and as yet it is with- 
out a rival. 

Outside the current of politics and political 
aspirations, there appeared during this same 
epoch a poet who exercised a considerable 
influence over Russian literature, and who 
devoted himself exclusively to poetry. This 
was Basin ZuHuKovsky (1783-1852). He 


52 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


opened the door of Russian literature on the 
fields of German and English poetry. The 
first poem he published in 1802 was a transla- 
tion of Gray’s Elegy; this, and an imitation 
of Biirger’s Leonore, which affected all Slav 
literatures, brought him fame. Later, he 
translated Schiller’s Maid of Orleans, his 
ballads, some of the lyrics of Uhland, Gocthe, 
Hebbel, and a great quantity of other foreign 
poems. His translations were faithful, but 
in spite of this he gave them the stamp of 
his own dreamy personality. He was made 
tutor to the Tsarevitch Alexander—afterwards 
Alexander II,—and for a time his production 
ceased; but when this task was finished, he 
braced himself in his old age to translate The 
Odyssey, and this translation appeared in 
1848-50. In this work he obeyed the first 
great law of translation, ‘Thou shalt not 
turn a good poem into a bad one.” He pro- 
duced a beautiful work; but he also did what 
all other translators of Homer have done; 
he took the Homer out and left the Zhukovsky, 
and with it something sentimental, elegiac, 
and didactic. 

Zhukovsky’s greatest service to Russian 
literature consisted in his exploding the 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 53 


superstition that the literature of France was 
the only literature that counted, and intro- 
ducing literary Russia to the poets of England 
and Germany rather than of France. But 
apart from this, he is the first and best 
translator in European literature, for what 
Krylov did with some of La Fontaine’s fables, 
he did for all the literature he touched—he 
re-created it in Russian, and made it his own. 
In his translation of Gray’s Elegy, for instance, 
he not only translates the poet’s meaning 
into musical verse, but he conveys the 
intangible atmosphere of dreamy landscape, 
and the poignant accent which makes that 
poem the natural language of grief. It is 
characteristic of him that, thirty-seven years 
after he translated the poem, he visited Stoke 
Poges, re-read Gray’s Elegy there, and made 
another translation, which is still more 
faithful than the first. 

The Russian language was by this time 
purified from all outward excrescences, re- 
leased from the bondage of convention and 
the pseudo-classical, open to all outside in- 
fluences, and only waiting, like a ready-tuned 
instrument, on which Krylov and Zhukovsky 
had already sounded sweet notes and deep 


54 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


tones, and which Karamzin had proved to be 
a magnificent vehicle for musical and per- 
spicuous prose, for a poet of genius to come 
and sound it from its lowest note to the top 
of its compass, for there was indeed much 
music and excellent voice to be plucked from 
it. At the appointed hour the man came. 
It was Pusuxin. He arrived at a time when 
a battle of words was raging between the so- 
called classical and romantic schools. The 
pseudo-classical, with all its mythological 
machinery and conventional apparatus, was 
totally alien to Russia, and a direct and slavish 
imitation of the French. On the other hand, 
the utmost confusion reigned as to what con- 
stituted romanticism. To each single writer it 
meant a different thing: “‘ Enfoncez Racine,” 
and the unities, in one case; or ghosts, 
ballads, legends, local colour in another; or 
the defiance of morality and society in another. 
Zhukovsky, in introducing German romanti- 
cism into Russia, paved the way for its death, 
and for the death of all exotic fashions and 
models; for he paved the way for Pushkin to 
render the whole quarrel obsolete by creating 
models of his own and by founding a national 
literature. 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 55 


Pushkin was born on May 26, 1799, at 
Moscow. He was of ancient lineage, and 
inherited African negro blood on his mother’s 
side, his mother’s grandmother being the 
daughter of Peter the Great’s negro, Hannibal. 
Until he was nine years old, he did not show 
signs of any unusual precocity ; but from then 
onwards he was seized with a passion for 
reading which lasted all his life. He read 
Plutarch’s Lives, the Iliad and the Odyssey 
in a translation. He then devoured all the 
French books he found in his father’s library. 
Pushkin was gifted with a photographic mem- 
ory, which retained what he read immediately 
and permanently. His first efforts at writing 
were in French,—comedies, which he per- 
formed himself to an audience of his sisters. 
He went to school in 1812 at the Lyceum of 
Tsarskoe Selo, a suburb of St. Petersburg. His 
school career was not brilliant, and his leayv- 
ing certificate qualifies his achievements as 
mediocre, even in Russian. But during the 
six years he spent at the Lyceum, he continued 
to read voraciously. His favourite poet at 
this time was Voltaire. He began to write 
verse, first in French and then in Russian; 
some of it was printed in 1814 and 1815 in 


56 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


reviews, and in 1815 he declaimed his Recol- 
lections of Tsarskoe Selo in public at the 
Lyceum examination, in the presence of 
Derzhavin the poet. 

The poems which he wrote at school ater 
wards formed part of his collected works. In 
these poems, consisting for the greater part of 
anacreontics and epistles, although they are 
immature, and imitative, partly of contempo- 
rary authors such as Derzhavin and Zhukov- 
sky, and partly of the French anacreontic 
school of poets, such as Voltaire, Gresset and 
Parny, the sound of a new voice was unmis- 
takable. Indeed, not only his contempor- 
aries, but the foremost representatives of the 
Russian literature of that day, Derzhavin, 
Karamzin and Zhukovsky, made no mistake 
about it. They greeted the first notes of this 
new lyre with enthusiasm. Zhukovsky used 
to visit the boy poet at school and read out 
his verse to him. Derzhavin was enthusiastic 
over the recitation of his Recollections of 
Tsarskoe Selo. Thus fame came to Pushkin 
as easily as the gift of writing verse. He had 
lisped in numbers, and as soon as he began 
to speak in them, his contemporaries imme- 
diately recognized and hailed the new voice. 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 57 


He did not wake up and find himself famous 
like Byron, but he walked into the Hall of 
Fame as naturally as a young heir steps into 
his lawful inheritance. If we compare 
Pushkin’s school-boy poetry with Byron’s 
Hours of Idleness, it is easy to understand 
how this came about. In the Hours of 
Idleness there is, perhaps, only one poem 
which would hold out hopes of serious pro- 
mise; and the most discerning critics would 
have been justified in being careful before 
venturing to stake any great hopes on so 
slender a hint. But in Pushkin’s early verse, 
although the subject-matter is borrowed, 
and the style is still irregular and careless, 
it is none the less obvious that it flows 
from the pen of the author without effort 
or strain; and besides this, certain coins of 
genuine poetry ring out, bearing the image 
and superscription of a new mint, the mint of 
Pushkin. 

When the first of his poems to attract the 
attention of a larger audience, Ruslan and 
Ludmila, was published, in 1820, it was 
greeted with enthusiasm by the public; but 
it had already won the suffrages of that 
circle which counted most, that is to say, 


58 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


the leading men of letters of the day, who 
had heard it read out in MSS. For as soon 
as Pushkin left school and stepped into the 
world, he was received into the literary circle 
of the day on equal terms. After he had read 
aloud the first cantos of Ruslan and Ludmila 
at Zhukovsky’s literary evenings, Zhukovsky 
gave him his portrait with this inscription : 
“To the pupil, from his defeated master ”’; 
and BATYUSHKOV, a poet who, after having 
been influenced, like Pushkin, by Voltaire and 
Parny, had gone back to the classics, Horace 
and Tibullus, and had introduced the classic 
anacreontic school of poetry into Russia, was 
astonished to find a young man of the world 
outplaying him without any trouble on the 
same lyre, and exclaimed, “Oh! how well 
the rascal has started writing ! ” 

The publication of Ruslan and Ludmila 
sealed Pushkin’s reputation definitely, as far 
as the general public was concerned, although 
some of the professional critics treated the 
poem with severity. The subject of the poem 
was a Russian fairy-tale, and the critics blamed 
the poet for having recourse to what they 
called Russian folk-lore, which they con- 
sidered to be unworthy of the poetic muse. 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 59 


One review complained that Pushkin’s choice 
of subject was like introducing a bearded 
unkempt peasant into a drawing-room, while 
others blamed him for dealing with national 
stuff in a flippant spirit. But the curious 
thing is that, while the critics blamed him 
for his choice of subject, and his friends and 
the public defended him for it, quoting all 
sorts of precedents, the poem has absolutely 
nothing in common, either in its spirit, style 
or characterization, with native Russian 
folk-lore and fairy-tales. Much later on in 
his career, Pushkin was to show what he 
could do with Russian folk-lore. But Ruslan 
and Ludmila, which, as far as its form is con- 
cerned, has a certain superficial resemblance 
to Ariosto, is in reality the result of the 
French influence, under which Pushkin had 
been ever since his cradle, and which in this 
poem blazes into the sky like a rocket, and 
bursts into a shower of sparks, never to 
return again. 

There is no passion in the poem and no 
irony, but it is young, fresh, full of sensuous, 
not to say sensual images, interruptions, 
digressions, and flippant epigrams. Pushkin 
wondered afterwards that nobody noticed 


60 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


the coldness of the poem; the truth was that 
the eyes of the public were dazzled by the 
fresh sensuous images, and their ears were 
taken captive by the new voice: for the im- 
portance of the poem lies in this—that the 
new voice which the literary pundits had 
already recognized in the Lyceum of Tsarskoe 
Selo was now speaking to the whole world, 
and all Russia became aware that a young 
man was among them “ with mouth of gold 
and morning in his eyes.” Ruslan and 
Ludmila has just the same sensuous richness, 
fresh music and fundamental coldness as 
Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. After finishing 
the poem, Pushkin added a magnificent and 
moving Epilogue, written from the Caucasus 
in the year of its publication (1820); and when 
the second edition was published in 1828, he 
added a Prologue in his finest manner which 
tells of Russian fairy-land. 1 

After leaving school in 1817, until 1820, 
Pushkin plunged into the gay life of St. 
Petersburg. He wanted to be a Hussar, but 
his father could not afford it. In default 
he became a Foreign Office official; but he did 
not take this profession seriously. He con- 
sorted with the political youth and young 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 61 


Liberals of the day; he scattered stinging 
epigrams and satirical epistles broadcast. 
He sympathized with the Decembrists, but 
took no part in their conspiracy. He would 
probably have ended by doing so; but, luckily 
for Russian literature, he was transferred in 
1820 from the Foreign Office to the Chancery 
of General Inzov in the South of Russia; 
and from 1820 to 1826 he lived first at Kishi- 
nev, then at Odessa, and finally in his own 
home at Pskov. This enforced banishment 
was of the greatest possible service to the 
poet; it took him away from the whirl and 
distractions of St. Petersburg; it prevented 
him from being compromised in the drama 
of the Decembrists; it ripened and matured 
his poetical genius; it provided him, since it 
was now that he visited the Caucasus and the 
Crimea for the first time, with new subject- 
matter. 

During this period he learnt Italian and 
English, and came under the influence of 
André Chénier and Byron. André Chénier’s 
influence is strongly felt in a series of lyrics 
in imitation of the classics; but these 
lyrics were altogether different from the 
anacreontics of his boyhood. Byron’s in- 


62 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


fluence is first manifested in a long poem 
The Prisoner of the Caucasus. It is Byronic 
in the temperament of the hero, who talks in 
the strain of the earlier Childe Harold; he is 
young, but feels old; tired of life, he seeks for 
consolation in the loneliness of nature in the 
Caucasus. He is taken prisoner by moun- 
tain tribesmen, and set free by a girl who 
drowns herself on account of her unrequited 
love. Pushkin said later that the poem was 
immature, but that there were verses in it 
that came from his heart. There is one 
element in the poem which is by no means 
immature, and that is the picture of the 
Caucasus, which is executed with much 
reality and simplicity. Pushkin annexed the 
Caucasus to Russian poetry. The Crimea 
inspired him with another tale, also Byronic 
in some respects, The Fountain of Baghchi-— 
Sarai, which tells of a Tartar Khan and his 
Christian slave, who is murdered out of 
jealousy by a former favourite, herself drowned 
by the orders of the Khan. Here again the 
descriptions are amazing, and Pushkin draws 
out a new stop of rich and voluptuous music. 

In speaking of the influence of Byron over 
Pushkin it is necessary to discriminate. 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 63 


Byron helped Pushkin to discover himself; 
Byron revealed to him his own powers, 
showed him the way out of the French 
garden where he had been dwelling, and acted 
as a guide to fresh woods and pastures new. 
But what Pushkin took from the new provinces 
to which the example of Byron led him was 
entirely different from what Byron sought 
there. Again, the methods and workmanship 
of the two poets were radically different. 
Pushkin is never imitative of Byron; but 
Byron opened his eyes to a new world, 
and indeed did for him what Chapman’s 
Homer did for Keats. It frequently happens 
that when a poet is deeply struck by the 
work of another poet he feels a desire to 
write something himself, but something dif- 
ferent. Thus Pushkin’s mental intercourse 
with Byron had the effect of bracing the 
talent of the Russian poet and spurring him 
on to the conquest of new worlds. 
Pushkin’s six years’ banishment to his own 
country had the effect of revealing to him 
the reality and seriousness of his vocation 
as a poet, and the range and strength of his 
gifts. It was during this period that besides 
the works already mentioned he wrote some 


64 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


of his finest lyrics, The Conversation between 
the Bookseller and the Poet—perhaps the most 
perfect of his shorter poems—it contains four 
lines to have written which Turgenev said he 
would have burnt the whole of his works—a 
larger poem called The Gypsies ; his dramatic 
chronicle Boris Godunov, and the beginning 
of his masterpiece Onegin; several ballads, 
including The Sage Oleg, and an unfinished 
romance, the Robber Brothers. 

Not only is the richness of his output 
during this period remarkable, but the variety 
and the high level of art maintained in all 
the different styles which he attempted and 
mastered. The Gypsies (1827), which was 
received with greater favour by the public 
than any of his poems, either earlier or later, 
is the story of a disappointed man, Aleko, 
who leaves the world and takes refuge with 
gypsies. A tragically ironical situation is the 
result. The anarchic nature of the Byronic 
misanthrope brings tragedy into the peaceful 
life of the people, who are lawless because 
they need no laws. Aleko loves and marries 
the gypsy Zemfira, but after a time she tires 
of him, and loves a young gypsy. Aleko 
surprises them and kills them both. Then 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 65 


Zemfira’s father banishes him from the 
gypsies’ camp. He, too, had been deceived. 
When his wife Mariula had been untrue and 
had left him, he had attempted no vengeance, 
but had brought up her daughter. 

** Leave us, proud man,” he says to Aleko. 
“We are a wild people; we have no laws, 
we torture not, neither do we punish; we 
have no use for blood or groans; we will not 
live with a man of blood. Thou wast not 
made for the wild life. For thyself alone 
thou claimest licence; we are shy and good- 
natured; thou art evil-minded and presump- 
tuous. Farewell, and peace be with thee!” 

The charm of the poem lies in the descrip- 
tions of the gypsy camp and the gypsy life, 
the snatches of gypsy song, and the character- 
ization of the gypsies, especially of the women. 
It is not surprising the poem was popular; it 
breathes a spell, and the reading of it conjures 
up before one the wandering life, the camp- 
fire, the soft speech and the song; and makes 
one long to go off with “the raggle-taggle 
gypsies O!” 

Byron’s influence soon gave way to that 
of Shakespeare, who opened a still larger 


field of vision to the Russian poet. In 1825 
E 


66 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


he writes : ““ Quel homme que ce Shakespeare ! 
Je n’en reviens pas. Comme Byron le tra- 
gique est mesquin devant lui! Ce Byron qui 
n’a jamais concu qu’un seul caracteére et c’est 
le sien . . . ce Byron done a partagé entre 
ses personages tel et tel trait de son carac- 
tére: son orgeuil 4 l’un, sa haine 4 lautre, 
sa mélancolie au _ troisiéme, ete., et c’est 
ainsi d’un caractére plein, sombre et énergique, 
il a fait plusieurs caractéres insignifiants; ce 
n’est pas la de la tragédie. On a encore une 
manie. Quand on a concu un caractére, tout 
ce qu’on lui fait dire, méme les choses les plus 
étranges, en porte essentiellement l’empreinte, 
comme les pédants et les marins dans les 
vieux romans de Fielding. Voyez le haineux 
de Byron . . . et la-dessus lisez Shakespeare. 
Il ne craint jamais de compromettre son 
personage, il le fait parler avec tout l’abandon 
de la vie, car il est str en temps et lieu, de 
lui faire trouver le langage de son caractére. 
Vous me demanderez : votre tragédie est-elle 
une tragédie de caractére ou de costume? 
J’ai choisi le genre le plus aisé, mais j’ai taché 
de les unir tous deux. J’écris et je pense. La 
plupart des scénes ne demandent que du 
raisonnement; quand j’arrive a une scéne qui 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 67 


demande de Jinspiration, j’attends ou je 
passe dessus.” 

I quote this letter because it throws light, 
firstly, on Pushkin’s matured opinion of 
Byron, and, secondly, on his methods of 
work; for, like Leonardo da Vinci, he formed 
the habit, which he here describes, of leaving 
unwritten passages where inspiration was 
needed, until he felt the moment of bien 
étre when inspiration came; and this not 
only in writing his tragedy, but henceforward 
in everything that he wrote, as his note-books 
testify. 

The subject-matter of Boris Godunov was 
based on Karamzin’s history: it deals with 
the dramatic episode of the Russian Perkin 
Warbeck, the false Demetrius who pretended 
to be the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible. 
The play is constructed on the model of 
Shakespeare’s chronicle plays, but in a still 
more disjointed fashion, without a definite 
beginning or end : when Mussorgsky made an 
opera out of it, the action was concentrated 
into definite acts; for, as it stands, it is not 
a play, but a series of scenes. Pushkin had 
not the power of conceiving and executing 
a drama which should move round one idea to 


68 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


an inevitable close. He had not the gift 
of dramatic architectonics, and still less that 
of stage carpentry. On the other hand, the 
scenes, whether they be tragic and poetical, 
or scenes of common life, are as vivid as any 
in Shakespeare; the characters are all alive, 
and they speak a language which is at the 
same time ancient, living, and convincing. 

In saying that Pushkin lacks the gift of 
stage architectonics and stage carpentry, it 
is not merely meant that he lacked the gift 
of arranging acts that would suit the stage, 
or that of imagining stage effects. His whole 
play is not conceived as a drama; a subject 
from which a drama might be written is taken, 
but the drama is left unwritten. We see 
Boris Godunov on the throne, which he has 
unlawfully usurped ; we know he feels remorse ; 
he tells us so in monologues; we see his soul 
stripped before us, bound upon a wheel of 
fire, and we watch the wheel revolve; and 
that is all the moral and spiritual action that 
the part contains; he is static and not dynamic, 
he never has to make up his mind; his will 
never has to encounter the shock of another 
will during the whole play. Neither does the 
chronicle centre round the Pretender. It is 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 69 


true that we see the idea of impersona- 
ting the Tsarevitch dawning in his mind; 
and it is also true that in one scene with his 
Polish love, Marina, we see him dynamically 
moving in a dramatic situation. She loves him 
because she thinks he is the son of an anointed 
King. He loves her too much to deceive her, 
and tells her the truth. She then says she 
will have nothing of him; and then he rises 
from defeat and shame to the height of the 
situation, becomes great, and, not unlike. 
Browning’s Sludge, says: “ Although I am 
an impostor, I am born to be a King all the 
same; I am one of Nature’s Kings; and I 
defy you to oust me from the situation. Tell 
every one what Ihave told you. Nobody will 
-believe you.” And Marina is conquered once 
more by his conduct and bearing. 

This scene is sheer drama; it is the conflict 
of two wills and two souls. But there the 
matter ends. The kaleidoscope is shaken, 
and we are shown a series of different patterns, 
in which the heroine plays no part at all, and 
in which the hero only makes a momentary 
appearance. The fact is there is neither hero 
nor heroine in the play. It is not a play, but 
a chronicle; and it would be foolish to blame 


70 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


Pushkin for not accomplishing what he never 
attempted. As a chronicle, a series of de- 
tached scenes, it is supremely successful. 
There are certain scenes which attain to 
sublimity : for instance, that in the cell of 
the monastery, where the monk is finishing 
his chronicle; and the monologue in which 
Boris speaks his remorse, and his dying 
speech to his son. The verse in these scenes 
is sealed with the mark of that God-gifted 
ease and high seriousness, which belong only 
to the inspired great. They are Shake- 
spearean, not because they imitate Shakespeare, 
but because they attain to heights of imagina- 
tive truth to which Shakespeare rises more 
often than any other poet; and the language 
in these scenes has a simplicity, an inevitable- 
ness, an absence of all conscious effort and of 
all visible art and artifice, a closeness of 
utterance combined with a width of suggestion 
which belong only to the greatest artists, to 
the Greeks, to Shakespeare, to Dante. 

Boris Godunov was not published until 
January 1, 1831, and passed, with one 
exception, absolutely unnoticed by the critics. 
Like so many great works, it came before its 
time; and it was not until years afterwards 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 71 


that the merits of this masterpiece were 
understood and appreciated. 

In 1826 Pushkin’s banishment to the 
country came to an end; in that year he was 
allowed to go to Moscow, and in 1827 to St. 
Petersburg. In 1826 his poems appeared in 
one volume, and the second canto of Onegin 
(the first had appeared in 1825). In 1827 
The Gypsies, and the third canto of Onegin ; 
in 1828 the fourth, fifth, and sixth cantos of 
Onegin ; in 1829 Graf Nulin, an admirably 
told Conte such as Maupassant might have 
written, of a deceived husband and a wife who, 
finding herself in the situation of Lucretia, 
gives the would-be Tarquin a box on the 
ears, but succeeds, nevertheless, in being un- 
faithful with some one else—the Cottage of 
Kolomna is another story in the same vein— 
and in the same year Poltava. 

This poem was written in one month, 
in St. Petersburg. The subject is Mazepa, 
with whom the daughter of his hereditary 
enemy, Kochubey, whom he afterwards tor- 
tures and kills, falls in love. But it is in 
reality the epic of Peter the Great.t| When 


1 The poem was originally called Mazepa: Pushkin 
changed the title so as not to clash with Byron. It is 


72 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


the poem was published, it disconcerted the 
critics and the public. It revealed an en- 
tirely new phase of Pushkin’s style, and it 
should have widened the popular conception 
of the poet’s powers and versatility. But at 
the time the public only knew Pushkin 
through his lyrics and his early tales; Boris 
Godunov had not yet been published; more- 
over, the public of that day expected to find 
in a poem passion and the delineation of 
the heart’s adventures. This stern objective 
fragment of an epic, falling into their senti- 
mental world of keepsakes, ribbons, roses and 
cupids, like a bas-relief conceived by a Titan 
and executed by a god, met with little appre- 


ciation. The poet’s verse which, so far as the 
fi cas 

interesting to see what Pushkin says of Byron’s poem, 
In his notes there is the following passage— 

“ Byron knew Mazepa through Voltaire’s history of 
Charles XII. He was struck solely by the picture of a 
man bound to a wild horse and borne over the steppes. 
A poetical picture of course; but see what he did with it. 
What a living creation! What abroad brush! But do 
not expect to find either Mazepa or Charles, nor the usual 
gloomy Byronic hero. Byron was not thinking of him. 
He presented a series of pictures, one more striking than 
the other. Had his pen come across the story of the 
seduced daughter and the father’s execution, it is im- 
probable that anyone else would have dared to touch 
the subject.” 





THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 73 


public knew it, had hitherto seemed like 
a shining and luscious fruit, was exchanged 
for a concentrated weighty tramp of ringing 
rhyme, martelé like steel. It is as if Tennyson 
had followed up his early poems in a style 
as concise as that of Pope and as concentrated 
as that of Browning’s dramatic lyrics. The 
poem is a fit monument to Peter the Great, 
and the great monarch’s impetuous genius 
and passion for thorough craftsmanship seem 
to have entered into it. 

In 1829. Pushkin made a second journey to 
the Caucasus, the result of which was a 
harvest of lyrics. On his return to St. 
Petersburg he sketched the plan of another 
epic poem, Galub, dealing with the Caucasus, 
but this remained a fragment. 

In 1881 he finished the eighth and last 
canto of Onegin. Originally there were nine 
cantos, but when the work was published one 
of the cantos dealing with Onegin’s travels 
was left out as being irrelevant. Pushkin 
had worked at this poem since 1823. It 
was Byron’s Beppo which gave him the 
idea of writing a poem on modern life; but 
here again, he made of the idea some- 
thing quite different from any of Byron’s 


74 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


work. Onegin is a novel. Eugene Onegin 
is the name of the hero. It is, moreover, 
the first Russian novel; and as a novel it 
has never been surpassed. It is as real as 
Tolstoy, as finished in workmanship and 
construction as Turgenev. It is a realistic 
novel; not realistic in the sense that Zola’s 
work was mis-called realistic, but realistic in 
the sense that Miss Austen is realistic. The 
hero is the average man about St. Petersburg; 
his father, a worthy public servant, lives 
honourably on debts and gives three balls a 
year. Onegin is brought up, not too strictly, 
by ‘“‘ Monsieur Abbé”; he goes out in the 
world clothed by a London tailor, fluent in 
French, and able to dance the Mazurka. 
Onegin can touch on every subject, can 
hold his tongue when the conversation becomes 
too serious, and make epigrams. He knows 
enough Latin to construe an epitaph, to talk 
about Juvenal, and put “ Vale!” at the end 
of his letters, and he can remember two lines 
of the Aineid. He is severe on Homer and 
Theocritus, but has read Adam Smith. The 
only art in which he is proficient is the ars 
amandi as taught by Ovid. He is a patron 
of the ballet: he goes to balls; he eats beef- 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 75 


steaks and paté de foie gras. In spite of all 
this—perhaps because of it—he suffers from 
spleen, like Childe Harold, the author says. 
His father dies, leaving a lot of debts behind 
him, but a dying uncle summons him to the 
country; and when he gets there he finds his 
uncle dead, and himself the inheritor of the 
estate. In the country, he is just as much 
bored as he was in St. Petersburg. A new 
neighbour arrives in the shape of Lensky, a 
young man fresh from Germany, an enthusi- 
ast and a poet, and full of Kant, Schiller, 
and the German writers. Lensky introduces 
Onegin to the neighbouring family, by name 
Larin, consisting of a widow and two daughters. 
Lensky is in love with the younger daughter, 
Olga, who is simple, fresh, blue-eyed, with a 
round face, as Onegin says, like the foolish 
moon. The elder sister, Tatiana, is less 
pretty; shy and dreamy, she conceals under 
her retiring and wistful ways a clean-cut 
character and a strong will. 

Tatiana is as real as any of Miss Austen’s 
heroines; as alive as Fielding’s Sophia Western, 
and as charming as any of George Meredith’s 
women; as sensible as Portia, as resolute as 
Juliet. Turgenev, with all his magic, and 


76 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


Tolstoy, with all his command over the colours 
of life, never created a truer, more radiant, 
and more typically Russian woman. She is 
the type of all that is best in the Russian 
woman; that is to say, of all that is best in 
Russia; and it is a type taken straight from 
life, and not from fairy-land—a type that 
exists as much to-day as it did in the days 
of Pushkin. She is the first of that long 
gallery of Russian women which Turgenev, 
Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky have given us, and 
which are the most precious jewels of Russian 
literature, because they reflect the crowning 
glory of Russian life. Tatiana falls in love 
with Onegin at first sight. She writes to him 
and confesses her love, and in all the love 
poetry of the world there is nothing more 
touching and more simple than this confession. 
It is perfect. If Pushkin had written this and 
this alone, his place among poets would be 
unique and different from that of all other 
poets. 

Possibly some people may think that there 
are finer achievements in the love poetry of 
the world; but nothing is so futile and so 
impertinent as giving marks to the great 
poets, as if they were passing an examination. 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 77 


If a thing is as good as possible in itself, what 
is the use of saying that it is less good or 
better than something else, which is as good 
as possible in itself also. Nevertheless, placed 
beside any of the great confessions of love in 
poetry—Francesca’s story in the Inferno, 
Romeo and Juliet’s leavetaking, Phédre’s 
declaration, Don Juan Tenorio’s letter—the 
beauty of Tatiana’s confession would not be 
diminished by the juxtaposition. Of the rest 
of Pushkin’s work at its best and highest, of 
the finest passages of Boris Godunov, for 
instance, you can say: This is magnificent, 
but there are dramatic passages in other 
works of other poets on the same lines and 
as fine; but in Tatiana’s letter Pushkin has 
created something unique, which has no 
parallel, because only a Russian could have 
written it, and of Russians, only he. It is 
a piece of poetry as pure as a crystal, as 
spontaneous as a blackbird’s song. 

Onegin tells Tatiana he is not worthy of 
her, that he is not made for love and marriage ; 
that he would cease to love her at once; that 
he feels for her like a brother, or perhaps a 
little more tenderly. It then falls out that 
Onegin, by flirting with Olga at a ball, makes 


78 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


Lensky jealous. They fight a duel, and 
Lensky is killed. Onegin is obliged to leave 
the neighbourhood, and spends years in travel. 
Tatiana remains true to her first love; but she 
is taken by her relatives to Moscow, and 
consents at last under their pressure to marry 
a rich man of great position. In St. Peters- 
burg, Onegin meets her again. Tatiana has 
become a great lady, but all her old charm 
is there. Onegin now falls violently in love 
with her; but she, although she frankly con- 
fesses that she still loves him, tells him that 
it is too late; she has married another, and 
she means to remain true to him. And there 
the story ends. 

Onegin is, perhaps, Pushkin’s most char- 
acteristic work; it is undoubtedly the best 
known and the most popular; like Hamlet, 
it is all quotations. Pushkin in his Onegin 
succeeded in doing what Shelley urged 
Byron to do—to create something new 
and in accordance with the spirit of the age, 
which should at the same time be beauti- 
ful. He did more than this. He succeeded 
in creating for Russia a poem that was purely 
national, and in giving his country a classic, 
a model both in construction, matter, form, 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 79 


and inspiration for future generations. Per- 
haps the greatest quality of this poem is its 
vividness. Pushkin himself speaks, in taking 
leave, of having seen the unfettered march 
of his novel in a magic prism. This is just 
the impression that the poem gives; the scenes 
are as clear as the shapes in a crystal; nothing 
is blurred ; thereare no hesitating notes, nothing 
a peu pres ; every stroke comes off; the nail 
is hit on the head every time, only so easily 
that you do not notice the strokes, and all 
labour escapes notice. Apart from this the 
poem is amusing; it arrests the attention as 
a story, and it delights the intelligence with 
its wit, its digressions, and its brilliance. It 
is as witty as Don Juan and as consummately 
expressed as Pope; and when the occasion 
demands it, the style passes in easy transition 
to serious or tender tones. Onegin has been 
compared to Byron’s Don Juan. There is 
this likeness, that both poems deal with 
contemporary life, and in both poems the 
poets pass from grave to gay, from severe to 
lively, and often interrupt the narrative to 
apostrophize the reader. But there the like- 
ness ends. On the other hand, there is a 
vast difference. Onegin contains no adven- 


80 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


tures. It is a story of everyday life. More- 
over, it is an organic whole : so well constructed 
that it fits into a stage libretto—Tchaikovsky 
made an opera out of it—without difficulty. 
There is another difference—a difference 
which applies to Pushkin and Byron in 
general. There is no unevenness in Pushkin; 
his work, as far as craft is concerned, is always 
on the same high level. You can admire the 
whole, or cut off any single passage and it 
will still remain admirable; whereas Byron 
must be taken as a whole or not at all—the 
reason being that Pushkin was an impeccable 
artist in form and expression, and that Byron 
was not. 

In the winter of 1882 Pushkin sought a 
new field, the field of historical research; and 
by the beginning of 1833 he had not only 
collected all the materials for a history of 
Pugachev, the Cossack who headed a rising 
in the reign of Catherine II; but his literary 
activity was so great that he had also written 
therough sketch of a long story in prose dealing 
with the same subject, The Captain’s Daughter, 
another prose story of considerable length, 
Dubrovsky, and portions of a drama, Rusalka, 
The Water Nymph, which was never finished. 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 81 


Besides Boris Godunov and the Rusalka, 
Pushkin wrote a certain number of dramatic 
scenes, or short dramas in one or more scenes. 
Of these, one, The Feast in the Time of Plague, 
is taken from the English of John Wilson (The 
City of the Plague), with original additions. 
In Mozart and Salieri we see the contrast 
between the genius which does what it must 
and the talent which does what it can. The 
story is based on the unfounded anecdote 
that Mozart was poisoned by Salieri out of 
envy. This dramatic and beautifully written 
episode has been set to music as it stands by 
Rimsky-Korsakov. 

The Covetous Knight, which bears the 
superscription, “From the tragi-comedy of 
Chenstone ’”—an unknown English original— 
tells of the conflict between a Harpagon and 
his son: the delineation of the miser’s ima- 
ginative passion for his treasures is, both in 
conception and execution, in Pushkin’s finest 
manner. This scene has been recently set to 
music by Rakhmaninov. The Guest of Stone, 
the story of Don Juan and the statua gentil- 
issima del gran Commendatore, makes Don 
Juan life. A scene from Faust between 
Faust and Mephistopheles is original and not 

F 


82 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


of great interest; Angelo is the story of 
Measure for Measure told as a narrative with 
two scenes in dialogue. Rusalka, The Water 
Maid, is taken from the genuine and not the 
sham province of national legend, and it is 
tantalizing that this poetic fragment remained 
a fragment. 

Pushkin’s prose is in some respects as 
remarkable as his verse. Here, too, he 
proved a pioneer. Dubrovsky is the story of 
a young officer whose father is ousted, like 
Naboth, from his small estate by his neigh- 
bour, a rich and greedy landed proprietor, 
becomes a highway robber so as to revenge 
himself, and introduces himself into the family 
of his enemy as a French master, but forgoes 
his revenge because he falls in love with his 
enemy’s daughter. In this extremely vivid 
story he anticipates Gogol in his life-like 
pictures of country life. The Captain’s 
Daughter is equally vivid; the rebel Pugachev 
has nothing stagey or melodramatic about 
him, nothing of Harrison Ainsworth. Of his 
shorter stories, such as The Blizzard, The 
Pistol Shot, The Lady-Peasant, the most 
entertaining, and certainly the most popular, 
3s The Queen of Spades, which was so admirably 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 83 


translated by Mérimée, and formed the sub- 
ject of one of Tchaikovsky’s most successful 
operas. As an artistic work The Egyptian 
Nights, written in 1828, is the most interesting, 
and ranks among Pushkin’s masterpieces. It 
tells of an Italian improvisatore who, at a 
party in St. Petersburg, improvises verses on 
Cleopatra and her lovers. The story is 
written to lead up to this poem, which gives 
a gorgeous picture of the pagan world, and 
is another example of Pushkin’s miraculous 
power of assimilation. Pushkin’s prose has 
the same limpidity and ease as his verse; the 
characters have the same vitality and reality 
as those in his poems and dramatic scenes, 
and had he lived longer he might have 
become a great novelist. As it is, he fur- 
nished Gogol (whose acquaintance he made 
in 1832) with the subject of two of his master- 
pieces—Dead Souls and The Revisor. 

The province of Russian folk-lore and 
legend from which Pushkin took the idea of 
Rusalka was to furnish him with a great 
deal of rich material. It was in 18381 that 
in friendly rivalry with Zhukovsky he wrote 
his first long fairy-tale, imitating the Russian 


popular style, The Tale of Tsar Saltan. Up 


84 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


till now he had written only a few ballads 
in the popular style. This fairy-tale was a 
brilliant success as a pastiche ; but it was a 
pastiche and not quite the real thing, as 
cleverness kept breaking in, and a touch of 
epigram here and there, which indeed makes 
it delightful reading. He followed it by another 
in the comic vein, The Tale of the Pope and 
his Man Balda, and by two more Mdrchen, 
The Dead Tsaritsa and The Golden Cock ; but 
it was not until two years later that he wrote 
his masterpiece in this vein, The Story of the 
Fisherman and the Fish. It is the same 
story as Grimm’s tale of the Fisherman’s 
wife who wished to be King, Emperor, and 
then Pope, and finally lost all by her vaulting 
ambition. The tale is written in unrhymed 
rhythmical, indeed scarcely rhythmical, lines; 
all trace of art is concealed; it is a tale such 
as might have been handed down by oral 
tradition in some obscure village out of the 
remotest past; it has the real Volkston ; the 
good-nature and simplicity and unobtrusive 
humour of a real fairy-tale. The subjects of 
all these stories were told to Pushkin by his 
nurse, Anna Rodionovna, who also furnished 
him with the subject of his ballad, The 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 85 


Bridegroom. In Pushkin’s note-books there 
are seven fairy-tales taken down hurriedly 
from the words of his nurse; and most likely 
all that he wrote dealing with the life of the 
people came from the same source. Pushkin 
called Anna Rodionovna his last teacher, 
and said that he was indebted to her for 
counteracting the effects of his first French 
education. 

In 1833 he finished a poem called The 
Brazen Horseman, the story of a man who 
loses his beloved in the great floods in St. 
Petersburg in 1834, and going mad, imagines 
that he is pursued by Falconet’s equestrian 
statue of Peter the Great. The poem contains 
a magnificent description of St. Petersburg. 
During the last years of his life, he was 
engaged in collecting materials for a history 
of Peter the Great. His power of production 
had never run dry from the moment he left 
school, although his actual work was inter- 
rupted from time to time by distractions and 
the society of his friends. 

All the important larger works of Pushkin 
have now been mentioned; but during the 
whole course of his career he was always 
pouring out a stream of lyrics and occasional 


86 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


pieces, many of which are among the most 
beautiful things he wrote. His variety and 
the width of his range are astonishing. Some 
of them have a grace and perfection such as 
we find in the Greek anthology; others— 
** Recollections,” for instance, in which in the 
sleepless hours of the night the poet sees pass 
_ before him the blotted scroll of his past deeds, 
which he is powerless with all the tears in the 
world to wash out—have the intensity of 
Shakespeare’s sonnets. This poem, for in- 
stance, has the same depth of feeling as 
‘* Tired with all these, for restful death I 
cry,” or “ The expense of spirit in a waste 
of shame.” Or he will write an elegy as 
tender as Tennyson; or he will draw a picture 
of a sledge in a snow-storm, and give you the 
plunge of the bewildered horses, the whirling 
demons of the storm, the bells ringing on the 
quiet spaces of snow, in intoxicating rhythms 
which E. A. Poe would have envied; or again 
he will write a description of the Caucasus 
in eleven short lines, close in expression and 
vast in suggestion, such as “‘ The Monastery 
on Kazbek ”’; or he will bring before you the 
smell of the autumn morning, and the hoofs 
ringing out on the half-frozen earth: or he 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 87 


will write a patriotic poem, such as To the 
Slanderers of Russia, fraught with patriotic 
indignation without being offensive; in this 
poem Pushkin paints an inspired picture of 
Russia: ‘‘ Will not,” he says, “‘ from Perm to 
the Caucasus, from Finland’s chill rocks to the 
flaming Colchis, from the shaken Kremlin to 
the unshaken walls of China, glistening with 
its bristling steel, the Russian earth arise? ” 
Or he will write a prayer, as lordly in utterance 
and as humble in spirit as one of the old 
Latin hymns; or a love-poem as tender as 
Musset and as playful as Heine: he will 
translate you the spirit of Horace and the 
spirit of Mickiewicz the Pole; he will secure 
the restraint of André Chénier, and the 
impetuous gallop of Byron. 

Perhaps the most characteristic of Pushkin’s 
poems is the poem which expresses his view 
of life in the elegy— 


* As bitter as stale aftermath of wine 
Is the remembrance of delirious days; 
But as wine waxes with the years, so weighs 
The past more sorely, as my days decline. 
My path is dark. The future lies in wait, 
A gathering ocean of anxiety, 
But oh ! my friends ! to suffer, to create, 


88 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


That is my prayer; to live and not to die! 

I know that ecstasy shall still lie there 

In sorrow and adversity and care. | 

Once more I shall be drunk on strains 
divine, 

Be moved to tears by musings that are 
mine; ‘ 

And haply when the last sad hour draws 
nigh 

Love with a farewell smile shall light the 
sky.” 


But the greatest of his short poems is prob- 
ably “‘ The Prophet.” This is a tremendous 
poem, and reaches a height to which Pushkin 
only attained once. It is Miltonic in concep- 
tion and Dantesque in expression ; the syllables 
ring out in pure concent, like blasts from a 
silver clarion. It is, as it were, the Pillars of 
Hercules of the Russian language. Nothing: 
finer as sound could ever be compounded 
with Russian vowels and consonants; nothing 
could be more perfectly planned, or present, 
in so small a vehicle, so large a vision to the 
imagination. Even a rough prose translation 
will give some idea of the imaginative splen- 
dour of the poem— 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 89 


“My spirit was weary, and I was athirst, 
and I was astray in the dark wilderness. 
And the Seraphim with six wings appeared 
to me at the crossing of the ways: And he 
touched my eyelids, and his fingers were as 
soft as sleep: and like the eyes of an eagle 
that is frightened my prophetic eyes were 
awakened. He touched my ears and he filled 
them with noise and with sound: and I 
heard the Heavens shuddering and the 
flight of the angels in the height, and the 
moving of the beasts that are under the 
waters, and the noise of the growth of the 
branches in the valley. He bent down over 
me and he looked upon my lips; and he tore 
out my sinful tongue, and he took away that 
which is idle and that which is evil with his 
right hand, and his right hand was dabbled 
with blood; and he set there in its stead, 
between my perishing lips, the tongue of a 
wise serpent. And he clove my breast asunder 
with a sword, and he plucked out my trem- 
bling heart, and in my cloven breast he set 
a burning coal of fire. Like a corpse in the 
desert I lay, and the voice of God called 
and said unto me, ‘ Prophet, arise, and take 
heed, and hear; be filled with My will, and 


90 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


go forth over the sea and over the land and 
set light with My word to the hearts of the 
people.’ ” , 

In 1837 came the catastrophe which brought 
about Pushkin’s death. It was caused by 
the clash of evil tongues engaged in frivolous 
gossip, and Pushkin’s own susceptible and vio- 
lent temperament. A guardsman, Heckeren- 
Dantes, had been flirting with his wife. 
Pushkin received an anonymous letter, and 
being wrongly convinced that Heckeren- 
Dantes was the author of it, wrote him a 
violent letter which made a duel inevitable. 
A duel was fought on the 27th of February, 
1837, and Pushkin was mortally wounded. 
Such was his frenzy of rage that, after lying 
wounded and unconscious in the snow, on 


regaining consciousness, he insisted on going on 


with the duel, and fired another shot, giving a 
great cry of joy when he saw that he had 
wounded his adversary. It was only a slight 
wound in the hand. It was not until he reached 
home that his anger passed away. He died 
on the 29th of February, after forty-five hours 
of excruciating suffering, heroically borne; 
he forgave his enemies; he wished no one to 
avenge him; he received the last sacraments: 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 91 


and he expressed feelings of loyalty and 
gratitude to his sovereign. He was thirty- 
seven years and eight months old. 

Pushkin’s career falls naturally into two 
divisions: his life until he was thirty, and 
his life after he was thirty. Pushkin began 
his career with liberal aspirations, and he 
disappointed some in the loyalty to the throne, 
the Church, the autocracy, and the established 
order of things which he manifested later; 
in turning to religion; in remaining in the 
Government service; in writing patriotic 
poems; in holding the position of Gentleman 
of the Bed Chamber at Court; in being, in 
fact, what is called a reactionary. But it 
would be a mistake to imagine that Pushkin 
was a Lost Leader who abandoned the cause 
of liberty for a handful of silver and a riband 
to stick in his coat. The liberal aspirations 
of Pushkin’s youth were the very air that the 
whole of the aristocratic youth of that day 
breathed. Pushkin could not escape being 
influenced by it; but he was no more a rebel 
then, than he was a reactionary afterwards, 
when again the very air which the whole of 
educated society breathed was conservative 
and nationalistic. It may be a pity that it 


92 - RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


was so; but soit was. There was no liberal 
atmosphere in the reign of Nicholas I, and 
the radical effervescence of the Decembrists 
was destroyed by the Decembrists’ premature 
action. It is no good making a revolution 
if you have nothing to make it with. The 
Decembrists were in the same position as 
the educated élite of one regiment at Versailles 
would have been, had it attempted to destroy 
the French monarchy in the days of Louis 
XIV. The Decembrists by their premature 
action put the clock of Russian political pro- 
gress back for years. The result was that 
men of impulse, aspiration, talent and origin- 
ality had in the reign of Nicholas to seek 
an outlet for their feelings elsewhere than in 
politics, because politics then were simply 
non-existent. | 

But apart from this, even if the oppor- 
tunities had been there, it may be doubted 
whether Pushkin would have taken them. 
He was not born with a passion to reform the 
world.. He was neither a rebel nor a re- 
former; neither a liberal nor a conservative; 
he was a democrat in his love for the whole of 
the Russian people; he was a patriot in his 
love of his country. He resembled Goethe 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 93 


rather than Socrates, or Shelley, or Byron; 
although, in his love of his country and in 
every other respect, his fiery temperament 
both in itself and in its expression was far 
removed from Goethe’s Olympian calm. He 
was like Goethe in his attitude towards society, 
and the attitude of the social and official 
world towards him resembles the attitude of 
Weimar towards Goethe. 

During the first part of his career he gave 
himself up to pleasure, passion, and self- 
indulgence; after he was thirty he turned his 
mind to more serious things. It would not 
be exact to say he became deeply religious, 
because he was religious by nature, and he 
soon discarded a fleeting phase of scepticism; 
but in spite of this he was a victim of amour- 
propre ; and he wavered between contempt 
of the society around him and a petty resent- 
ment against it which took the shape of 
scathing and sometimes cruel epigrams. It 
was this dangerous amour-propre, the fact of 
his being not only passion’s slave, but petty 
passion’s slave, which made him a victim of 
frivolous gossip and led to the final catas- 
trophe. 

“In Pushkin,” says Soloviev, the philo- 


94 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


sopher, “according to his own testimony 
there were two different and separate beings : 
the inspired priest of Apollo, and the most 
frivolous of all the frivolous children of the 
world.” It was the first Pushkin—the in- 
spired priest—who predominated in the latter 
part of his life; but who was unable to expel 
altogether the second Pushkin, the frivolous 
Weltkind, who was prone to be exasperated 
by the society in which he lived, and when 
exasperated was dangerous. There is one 
fact, however, which accounts for much. 
The more serious Pushkin’s turn of thought 
grew, the more objective, purer, and stronger 
his work became, the less it was appreciated ; 
for the public which delighted in the com- 
paratively inferior work of his youth was not 
yet ready for his more mature work. What 
pleased the public were the dazzling colours, 
the sensuous and sometimes libidinous images 
of his early poems; the romantic atmosphere ; 
especially anything that was artificial in 
them. They had not yet eyes to appreciate 
the noble lines, nor ears to appreciate the 
simpler and more majestic harmonies of his 
later work, Thus it was that they passed Boris 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 95 


Godunov by, and were disappointed in the 
later cantos of Onegin. This was, of course, 
discouraging. Nevertheless, it is laughable 
to rank Pushkin amongst the misunderstood, 
among the Shelleys, the Millets, of Literature 
and Art; or to talk of his sad fate. To talk 
of him as one of the victims of literature is 
merely to depreciate him. 

He was exiled. Yes: but to the Caucasus, 
which gave him inspiration: to his own 
country home, which gave him leisure. He 
was censored. Yes: but the Emperor under- 
took to do the work himself. Had he lived 
in England, society—as was proved in the 
case of Byron—would have been a far severer 
censor of his morals and the extravagance of 
his youth, than the Russian Government. 
Besides which, he won instantaneous fame, 
and in the society in which he moved he was 
surrounded by a band not only of devoted but 
distinguished admirers, amongst whom were 
some of the highest names in Russian literature 
—Karamzin, Zhukovsky, Gogol. 

Pushkin is Russia’s national poet, the Peter 
the Great of poetry, who out of foreign 
material created something new, national 


96 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


and Russian, and left imperishable models for 
future generations. The chief characteristic 
of his genius is its universality. There 
appeared to be nothing he could not under- 
stand nor assimilate. And it is just this all- 
embracing humanity—Dostoyevsky calls him 
savav0oewsoc—this capacity for understanding 
everything and everybody, which makes him 
so profoundly Russian. He is a poet of every- 
day life: a realistic poet, and above all things 
a lyrical poet. He is not a dramatist, and as 
an epic writer, though he can mould a bas-relief 
and produce a noble fragment, he cannot set 
crowds in motion. He revealed to the Russians 
the beauty of their landscape and the poetry 
of their people; and they, with ears full of 
pompous diction, and eyes full of rococo and 
romantic stage properties, did not understand 
what he was doing: but they understood 
later. For a time he fought against the 
stream, and all in vain; and then he gave 
himself up to the great current, which took 
him all too soon to the open sea. 

He set free the Russian language from the 
bondage of the conventional; and all his life 
he was still learning to become more and more 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 97 


intimate with the savour and smell of the 
people’s language. Like Peter the Great, 
he spent his whole life in apprenticeship, and 
his whole energies in craftsmanship. He was 
a great artist; his style is perspicuous, plastic, 
and pure; there is never a blurred outline, 
never a smear, never a halting phrase or a 
hesitating note. His concrete images are, as 
it were, transparent, like Donne’s description 
of the woman whose 

“ , .. . pure and eloquent blood 
Spoke in her face, and so distinctly wrought, 
That you might almost think her body 

thought.” 


His diction is the inseparable skin of the 
thought. You seem to hear him thinking. 
He was gifted with divine ease and unpre- 
meditated spontaneity. His soul was sincere, 
noble, and open; he was frivolous, a child 
of the world and of his century; but if he 
was worldly, he was human; he was a citizen 
as well as a child of the world; and it is that 
which makes him the greatest of Russian 


poets. 
G 


98 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


His career was unromantic; he was rooted 
to the earth; an aristocrat by birth, an official 
by profession, a lover of society by taste. At 
the same time, he sought and served beauty, 
strenuously and faithfully; he was perhaps 
too faithful a servant of Apollo; too exclusive 
a lover of the beautiful. In his work you find 
none of the piteous cries, no beauty of soaring 
and bleeding wings as in Shelley, nor the 
sound of rebellious sobs as in Musset; no 
tempest of defiant challenge, no lightnings 
of divine derision, as in Byron; his is neither 
the martyrdom of a fighting Heine, that 
“brave soldier in the war of the liberation 
of humanity,” nor the agonized passion of a 
suffering Catullus. He never descended into 
Hell. Every great man is either an artist or 
a fighter ; and often poets of genius, Byron 
and Heine for instance, are more pre-eminently 
fighters than they are artists. Pushkin was 
an artist, and not a fighter. And this is what 
makes even his love-poems cold in comparison 
with those of other poets. Although he was 
the first to make notable what was called the 
romantic movement; and although at the 
beginning of his career he handled romantic 


THE NEW AGE—PUSHKIN 99 


subjects in a more or less romantic way, he 
was fundamentally a classicist—a classicist 
as much in the common-sense and realism and 
solidity of his conceptions and ideas, as in the 
perspicuity and finish of his impeccable form. 
And he soon cast aside even the vehicles 
and clothes of romanticism, and exclusively 
followed reality. ‘‘ He strove with none, for 
none was worth his strife.” And when his 
artistic ideals were misunderstood and de- 
preciated, he retired into himself and wrote 
to please himself only; but in the inner court 
of the Temple of Beauty into which he retired 
he created imperishable things; for he loved 
nature, he loved art, he loved his country, 
and he expressed that love in matchless 
song. 

For years, Russian criticism was either 
neglectful of his work or unjust towards it; 
for his serene music and harmonious design 
left the generations which came after him, who 
were tossed on a tempest of social problems and 
political aspirations, cold; but in 1881, when 
Dostoyevsky unveiled Pushkin’s memorial at 
Moscow, the homage which he paid to the 
dead poet voiced the unanimous feeling of 


100 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 

the whole of Russia. His work is beyond 
the reach of critics, whether favourable or 
unfavourable, for it lives in the hearts of 
his countrymen, and chiefly upon the lips of 
the young. 


CHAPTER III 
LERMONTOV 


THE romantic movement in Russia was, as 
far as Pushkin was concerned, not really a 
romantic movement at all. Still less was it 
so in the case of the Pléiade which followed 
him. And yet, for want of a better word, one 
is obliged to call it the romantic movement, as 
it was a new movement, a renascence that 
arose out of the ashes of the pseudo-classical 
eighteenth century convention. Pushkin was 
followed by a Pléiade. 

The claim of his friend and fellow-student, 
Baron Detvic, to fame, rests rather on his 
friendship with Pushkin (to whom he played 
the part of an admirable critic) than on his 
own verse. He died in 1831. Yazyxov, 
PrincE BaRIATINSKY, VENEVITINOY, and 
POLEZHAEY, can all be included in the Pléiade; 
all these are lyrical poets of the second order, 


and none of them—except Polezhaev, whose 
101 


102 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


real promise of talent was shattered by cir- 
cumstances (he died of drink and consumption 
after a career of tragic vicissitudes)—has 
more than an historical interest. 

Pushkin’s successor to the throne of Russian 
letters was Lermontov: no unworthy heir. 
The name Lermontov is said to be the same 
as the Scotch Learmonth. The story of his 
short life is a simple one. He was born at 
Moscow in 1814. He visited the Caucasus 
when he was twelve. He was taught English 
by a tutor. He went to school at Moscow, 
and afterwards to the University. He left 
in 1832 owing to the disputes he had with the 
professors. At the age of eighteen, he entered 
the Guards’ Cadet School at St. Petersburg; 
and two years later he became an officer in 
the regiment of the Hussars. In 1887 he was 
transferred to Georgia, owing to the scandal 
caused by the outspoken violence of his verse; 
but he was transferred to Novgorod in 18388, 
and was allowed to return to St. Petersburg 
in the same year. In 1840 he was again 
transferred to the Caucasus for fighting a duel 
with the son of the French Ambassador; 
towards the end of the year, he was once more 
allowed to return to St. Petersburg. In 1841 


LERMONTOV 103 


he went back for a third time to the Caucasus, 
where he forced a duel on one of his friends 
over a perfectly trivial incident, and was killed, 
on the 15th of July of the same year. 

In all the annals of poetry, there is no more 
curious figure than Lermontov. He was like 
a plant that above all others needed a sym- 
pathetic soil, a favourable atmosphere, and 
careful attention. As it was, he came in the 
full tide of the régime of Nicholas I, a régime 
of patriarchal supervision, government inter- 
ference, rigorous censorship, and iron discip- 
line,—a grey epoch absolutely devoid of all 
ideal aspirations. Considerable light is thrown 
on the contradictory and original character of 
the poet by his novel, 4 Hero of Our Days, the 
first psychological novel that appeared in 
Russia. The hero, Pechorin, is undoubtedly 
a portrait of the poet, although he himself 
said, and perhaps thought, that he was merely 
creating a type. 

The hero of the story, who is an officer in 
the Caucasus, analyses his own character, 
and lays bare his weaknesses, follies, and 
faults, with the utmost frankness. “J am 
incapable of friendship,” he says. ‘‘ Of two 
friends, one is always the slave of the other, 


104 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


although often neither of them will admit it; 
I cannot be a slave, and to be a master is a 
tiring business.”” Or he writes: “I have an 
innate passion for contradiction. . . . The 
presence of enthusiasm turns me to ice, and 
intercourse with a phlegmatic temperament 
would turn me into a passionate dreamer.” 
Speaking of enemies, he says: “I love 
enemies, but not after the Christian fashion.” 
And on another occasion: “ Why do they 
all hate me? Why? MHave I offended any 
one? No. Do I belong to that category of 
people whose mere presence creates anti- 
pathy?” Again: “I despise myself some- 
times, is not that the reason that I despise 
others? I have become incapable of noble 
impulses. Iam afraid of appearing ridiculous 
to myself.” ; 

On the eve of fighting a duel Pechorin writes 
as follows— 

*“ If I die it will not be a great loss to the 
world, and as for me, I am sufficiently tired 
of life. I am like a man yawning at a ball, 
who does not go home to bed because the 
carriage is not there, but as soon as the carriage 
is there, Good-bye ! ” . 

*“T review my past and I ask myself, Why 


LERMONTOV 105 


have I lived? Why was I born? and I think 
there was a reason, and I think I was called 
to high things, for I feel in my soul the presence 
of vast powers; but I did not divine my high 
calling; I gave myself up to the allurement 
of shallow and ignoble passions; I emerged 
from their furnace as hard and as cold as iron, 
but I had lost for ever the ardour of noble 
aspirations, the flower of life. And since then 
how often have I played the part of the axe 
in the hands of fate. Like the weapon of the 
executioner I have fallen on the necks of the 
victims, often without malice, always without 
pity. My love has never brought happiness, 
because I have never in the slightest degree 
sacrificed myself for those whom I loved. I 
loved for my own sake, for my own pleasure. ... 
And if I die I shall not leave behind me one 
soul who understood me. Some think I am 
better, others that I am worse than I am. 
Some will say he was a good fellow; others he 
was a blackguard.” 

It will be seen from these passages, all of 
which apply to Lermontov himself, even if 
they were not so intended, that he must have 
been a trying companion, friend, or acquaint- 
ance. He had, indeed, except for a few 


106 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


intimate friends, an impossible temperament; 
he was proud, overbearing, exasperated and ex- 
asperating, filled with a savage amour-propre ; 
and he took a childish delight in annoying; 
he cultivated “le plaisir aristocratique de 
déplaire ’’; he was envious of what was least 
enviable in his contemporaries. He could 
not bear not to make himself felt, and if he 
felt that he was unsuccessful in accomplishing 
this by pleasant means, he resorted to un- 
pleasant means. And yet, at the same time, 
he was warm-hearted, thirsting for love and 
kindness, and capable of giving himself up 
to love—if he chose. 

During his period of training at the Cadet 
School, he led a wild life; and when he 
became an officer, he hankered after social 
and not after literary success. He did not 
achieve it immediately; at first he was not 
noticed, and when he was noticed he was not 
liked. His looks were unprepossessing, and 
one of his legs was shorter than the other. His 
physical strength was enormous—he could 
bend a ramrod with his fingers. Noticed he 
was determined to be; and, as he himself 
says in one of his letters, observing that 
every one in society had some sort of pedestal 


LERMONTOV 107 


—wealth, lineage, position, or patronage—he 
saw that if he, not pre-eminently possessing 
any of these,—though he was, as a matter of 
fact, of a good Moscow family,—could suc- 
ceed in engaging the attention of one person, 
others would soon follow suit. This he set 
about to do by compromising a girl and 
then abandoning her: and he acquired the 
reputation of a Don Juan. Later, when 
he came back from the Caucasus, he was 
treated as a lion. All this does not throw a 
pleasant light on his character, more especially 
as he criticized in scathing tones the society 
in which he was anxious to play a part, and 
in which he subsequently enjoyed playing 
a part. But perhaps both attitudes of mind 
were sincere. He probably sincerely enjoyed 
society, and hankered after success in it; and 
equally sincerely despised society and himself 
for hankering after it. 

As he grew older, his pride and the ex- 
asperating provocativeness of his conduct 
increased to such an extent that he seemed 
positively seeking for serious trouble, and for 
some one whose patience he could overtax, and 
on whom he could fasten a quarrel. And 
this was not slow to happen. 


108 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


At the bottom of all this lay no doubt a 
deep-seated disgust with himself and with the 
world in general, and a complete indifference 
to life, resulting from large aspirations which 
could not find an outlet, and so recoiled upon 
himself. The epoch, the atmosphere and the 
society were the worst possible for his peculiar 
nature; and the only fruitful result of the 
friction between himself and the society and 
the established order of his time, was that he 
was sent to the Caucasus, which proved to be 
a source of inspiration for him, as it had 
been for Pushkin. One is inclined to say, 
“Tf only he had lived later or longer”; yet 
it may be doubted whether, had he been born 
in a more favourable epoch, either earlier in 
the milder régime of Alexander I, or later, 
in the enthusiastic epoch of the reforms, he 
would have been a happier man and produced 
finer work. 

The curious thing is that his work does not 
reveal an overwhelming pessimism like Leo- 
pardi’s, an accent of revolt like Musset’s, or of 
combat like Byron’s; but rather it testifies to 
a fundamental indifference to life, a concen- 
trated pride. If it be true that you can 
roughly divide the Russian temperament into 


LERMONTOV 109 


two types—the type of the pure fool, such as 
Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, and a type of uncon- 
querable pride, such as Lucifer—then Ler- 
montov is certainly a fine example of the 
second type. You feel that he will never 
submit or yield; but then he died young; and 
the Russian poets often changed, and not 
infrequently adopted a compromise which was 
the same thing as submission. 

Lermontov was, like Pushkin, essentially 
a lyric poet, still more subjective, and pro- 
foundly self-centred. His attempts at the 
drama (imitations of Schiller and an attempt 
at the manner of Griboyedov) were failures. 
But, unlike Pushkin, he was a true romantic; 
and his work proves to us how essentially 
different a thing Russian romanticism is from 
French, German or English romanticism. 
He began with astonishing precocity to write 
verse when he was twelve. His earliest 
efforts were in French. He then began to 
imitate Pushkin. While at the Cadet School 
he wrote a series of cleverly written, more or 
less indecent, and more or less Byronic—the 
Byron of Beppo—tales in verse, describing 
his love adventures, and episodes of garrison 
life. What brought him fame was his ‘‘ Ode 


110 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


on the Death of Pushkin,” which, although 
unjustified by the actual facts—he represents 
Pushkin as the victim of a _ bloodthirsty 
society—strikes strong and bitter chords. 
Here, without any doubt, are “thoughts 
that breathe and words that burn ’’>— 


‘** And you, the proud and shameless progeny 

Of fathers famous for their infamy, 

You, who with servile heel have trampled 
down 

The fragments of great names laid low by 
chance, 

You, hungry crowd that swarms about the 
throne, 

Butchers of freedom, and genius, and glory, 

You hide behind the shelter of the law, 

Before you, right and justice must be dumb! 

But, parasites of vice, there’s God’s assize; 

There is an awful court of law that waits. 

You cannot reach it with the sound of gold; 

It knows your thoughts beforehand and 
your deeds; 

And vainly you shall call the lying witness; 

That shall not help you any more; 

And not with all the filth of all your gore 

Shall you wash out the poet’s righteous 
blood.” 


LERMONTOV 111 


He struck this strong chord more than once, 
especially in his indictment of his own genera- 
tion, called “ A Thought”; and in a poem 
written on the transfer of Napoleon’s ashes 
to Paris, in which he pours scorn on the 
French for deserting Napoleon when he lived 
and then acclaiming his ashes. 

But it is not in poems such as these that 
Lermontov’s most characteristic qualities are 
to be found. Lermontov owed nothing to 
his contemporaries, little to his predecessors, 
and still less to foreign models. It is true 
that, as a schoolboy, he wrote verses full of 
Byronic disillusion and satiety, but these 
were merely echoes of his reading. The 
gloom of spirit which he expressed later on 
was a permanent and innate feature of his 
own temperament. Later, the reading of 
Shelley spurred on his imagination to emula- 
tion, but not to imitation. He sought his 
own path from the beginning, and he remained 
in it with obdurate persistence. He remained 
obstinately himself, indifferent as a rule to 
outside events, currents of thought and 
feeling. And he clung to the themes which 
he chose in his youth. His mind to him a 
kingdom was, and he peopled it with images 


112 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


and fancies of his own devising. The path 
which he chose was a narrow one. It was a 
romantic path. He chose for the subject of 
the poem by which he is perhaps most widely 
known, The Demon, the love of a demon for 
a woman. The subject is as romantic as any 
chosen by Thomas Moore; but there is nothing 
now that appears rococo in Lermontov’s work. 
The colours are as fresh to-day as when they 
were first laid on. The heroine is a Circassian 
woman, and the action of the poem is in the 
Caucasus. 

The Demon portrayed is not the spirit that 
denies of Goethe, nor Byron’s Lucifer, looking 
the Almighty in His face and telling him that 
His evil is not good; nor does he cherish— 


‘the study of revenge, immortal hate,” 


of Milton’s Satan; but he is the lost angel of 
a ruined paradise, who is too proud to accept 
oblivion even were it offered to him. He 
dreams of finding in Tamara the joys of the 
paradise he has foregone. “I am he,” he 
says to her, “ whom no one loves, whom 
every human being curses.” He declares 
that he has foresworn his proud thoughts, 
that he desires to be reconciled with Heaven, 
to love, to pray, to believe in good. And he 











LERMONTOV 113 


pours out to her one of the most passionate 
love declarations ever written, in couplet after 
couplet of words that glow like jewels and 
tremble like the strings of a harp. Tamara 
yields to him, and forfeits her life; but her 
soul is borne to Heaven by the Angel of 
Light; she has redeemed her sin by death, 
and the Demon is left as before alone in a 
loveless lampless universe. The poem is 
interspersed with descriptions of the Caucasus, 
which are as glowing and splendid as the 
impassioned utterance of the Demon. They 
put Pushkin’s descriptions in the shade. 
Lermontov’s landscape-painting compared 
with Pushkin’s is like a picture of Turner 
compared with a Constable or a Bonnington. 

Lermontov followed up his first draft of 
The Demon (originally planned in 1829, but 
not finished in its final form until 1841) with 
other romantic tales, the scene of which for 
the most part is laid in the Caucasus: such as 
Izmail Bey, Hadji-Abrek, Orsha the Boyar—the 
last not a Caucasian tale. These were nearly all 
of them sketches in which he tried the colours 
of his palette. But with Misyri, the Novice, 
in which he used some of the materials of the 


former tales, he produced a finished picture. 
H 


114 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


Mtsyri is the story of a Circassian orphan 
who is educated in aconvent. The child grows 
up home-sick at heart, and one day his longing 
for freedom becomes ungovernable, and he 
escapes and roams about in the mountains. 
He loses his way in the forest and is brought 
back to the monastery after three days, dying 
from starvation, exertion, and exhaustion. 
Before he dies he pours out his confession, 
which takes up the greater part of the poem. 
He confesses how in the monastery he felt 
his own country and his own people forever 
calling, and how he felt he must seek his own 
people. He describes his wanderings: how 
he scrambles down the mountain-side and 
hears the song of a Georgian woman, and 
sees her as she walks down a narrow path witha 
pitcher on her head and draws water from the 
stream. At nightfall he sees the light of a 
dwelling-place twinkling like a falling star; 
but he dares not seek it. He loses his way 
in the forest, he encounters and kills a 
panther. In the morning, he finds a way out 
of the woods when the daylight comes; he 
lies in the grass exhausted under the blinding 
noon, of which Lermontov gives a gorgeous 
and detailed description— 


LERMONTOV 115 


*“ And on God’s world there lay the deep 
And heavy spell of utter sleep, 
Although the landrail called, and I 
Could hear the trill of the dragonfly 
Or else the lisping of the stream .. . 
Only a snake, with a yellow gleam 
Like golden lettering inlaid 
From hilt to tip upon a blade, 

Was rustling, for the grass was dry, 
And in the loose sand cautiously 

It slid, and then began to spring 

And roll itself into a ring, 

Then, as though struck by sudden fear, 
Made haste to dart and disappear.” 


Perishing of hunger and thirst, fever and 
delirium overtake him, and he fancies that 
he is lying at the bottom of a deep stream, 
where speckled fishes are playing in the 
crystal waters. One of them nestles close to 
him and sings to him with a silver voice a 
lullaby, unearthly, like the song of Ariel, and 
alluring like the call of the Erl King’s 
daughter. In this poem Lermontov reaches 
the high-water mark of his descriptive powers. 
Its pages glow with the splendour of the 
Caucasus, 


116 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


To his two masterpieces, The Demon 
and Mtsyri, he was to add a third: The 
Song of the Tsar Ivan Vasilievich, the Oprich- 
nik (bodyguardsman), and the Merchant 
Kalashnikov. The Oprichnik insults the 
Merchant’s wife, and the Merchant challenges 
him to fight with his fists, kills him, and 
is executed for it. This poem is written as a 
folk-story, in the style of the Byliny, and it 
in no way resembles a pastiche. It equals, if 
it does not surpass, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov 
as a realistic vision of the past; and as an 
epic tale, for simplicity, absolute appropriate- 
ness of tone, vividness, truth to nature and 
terseness, there is nothing in modern Russian 
literature to compare with it. Besides these 
larger poems, Lermontov wrote a quantity 
of short lyrics, many of which, such as “‘ The 
Sail,” “The Angel,’’ “The Prayer,” every 
Russian child knows by heart. 

When we come to consider the qualities of 
Lermontov’s romantic work, and ask ourselves 
in what it differs from the romanticism of the 
West—from that of Victor Hugo, Heine, 
Musset, Espronceda—we find that in Ler- 
montov’s work, as in all Russian work, there 
is mingled with his lyrical, imaginative, and 


LERMONTOV 117 


descriptive powers, a bed-rock of matter-of- 
fact common-sense, a root that is deeply 
embedded in reality, in the life of everyday. 
He never escapes into the “ intense inane ” 
of Shelley. Imaginative he is, but he is never 
lost in the dim twilight of Coleridge. Roman- 
tic he is, but one note of Heine takes us into 
a different world : ‘for instance, Heine’s quite 
ordinary adventures in the Harz Mountains 
convey a spell and glamour that takes us 
over a borderland that Lermontov never 
crossed. 

Nothing could be more splendid than 
Lermontovy’s descriptions; but they are, com- 
pared with those of Western poets, concrete, 
as sharp as views in a camera obscura. He 
never ate the roots of “relish sweet, the 
honey wild and manna dew ”’ of the “ Belle 
Dame Sans Merci ’’; he wrote of places where 
Kubla Khan might have wandered, of “ an- 
cestral voices prophesying war,” but one has 
only to quote that line to see that Lermontov’s 
poetic world, compared with Coleridge’s, is 
solid fact beside intangible dream. 

- Compared even with Musset and Victor 
Hugo, how much nearer the earth Lermontov 
is than either of them! Victor Hugo dealt 


118 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


with just the same themes; but in Lermontov, 
the most splendid painter of mountains 
imaginable, you never hear 


** Le vent qui vient 4 travers la montagne,” 


and you know that it will never drive the 
Russian poet to frenzy. On the other hand, 
you never get Victor Hugo’s extravagance 
and absurdities. Or take Musset; Musset 
dealt with romantic themes s2 quis alius ; but 
when he deals with a subject like Don Juan, 
which of all subjects belonged to the age of 
Pushkin and Lermontov, he writes lines like 
these— 


“* Faible, et, comme le lierre, ayant besoin 
d’autrui; 

Kt ne le cachant pas, et suspendant son 4me, 

Comme un luth éolien, aux lévres de la nuit.” 


Here again we are confronted with a different 
kind of imagination. Or take a bit of sheer 
description— 


‘“* Pale comme l’amour, et de pleurs arrosée, ° 
La nuit aux pieds d’argent descend dans la 
rosée.”’ 


You never find the Russian poet impersonat- 


LERMONTOV 119 


ing nature like this, and creating from objects 
such as the “ yellow bees in the ivy bloom ” 
_ forms more real than living man. The objects 
themselves suffice. Lermontov sang of dis- 
appointed love over and over again, but never 
did he create a single image such as— 


** Elle aurait aimé, si l’orgueil 
Pareil & la lampe inutile 
Qu’on allume prés d’un cercueil, 
N’eut veillé sur son coeur stérile.” 


In his descriptive work he is more like Byron; 
but Byron was far less romantic and far less 
imaginative than Lermontov, although he 
invented Byronism, and shattered the crumb- 
ling walls of the eighteenth century that 
surrounded the city of romance, and dallied 
with romantic themes in his youth. All his 
best work, the finest passages of Childe 
Harold, and the whole of Don Juan, were 
slices of his own life and observation, choses 
vues ; he never created a single character that 
was not a reflection of himself; and he never 
entered into the city whose walls he had 
stormed, and where he had planted his flag. 
This does not mean that Lermontov is 
inferior to the Western romantic poets. It 


120 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


simply means that the Russian poet is—and 
one might add the Russian poets are—different. 
And, indeed, it is this very difference,—what 
he did with this peculiar realistic paste in his 
composition,—that constitutes his unique ex- 
cellence. So far from its being a vice, he made it 
into his especial virtue. Lermontov sometimes, 
in presenting a situation and writing a poem 
on a fact, presents that situation and that 
fact without exaggeration, emphasis, adorn- 
ment, imagery, metaphor, or fancy of any 
kind, in the language of everyday life, and at 
the same time he achieves poetry. This was 
Wordsworth’s ideal, and he fulfilled it. 

A case in point is his long poem on the 
Oprichnik, which has been mentioned; and 
some of the most striking examples of this 
unadorned and realistic writing are to be 
found in his lyrics. In the “‘ Testament,” for. 
example, where a wounded officer gives his 
last instructions to his friend who is going 
home on leave— 


**T want to be alone with you, 
A moment quite alone. 
The minutes left to me are few, 
They say Ill soon be gone. 


LERMONTOV 121 


And you’ll be going home on leave, 
Then say ... but why? I do believe 
There’s not a soul, who’ll greatly care 
To hear about me over there. 


And yet if some one asks you there, 
Let us suppose they do— 
Tell them a bullet hit me here, 
The chest,—and it went through. 
And say I died and for the Tsar, 
And say what fools the doctors are ;— 
And that I shook you by the hand, 
And thought about my native land. 


My father and my mother, too! 
They may be dead by now; 
To tell the truth, it wouldn’t do 
To grieve them anyhow. 
If one of them is living, say 
I’m bad at writing home, and they 
Have sent us to the front, you see,— 
And that they needn’t wait for me. 


We had a neighbour, as you know, 
And you remember I 

And she . . . How very long ago 
It is we said good-bye ! 


122 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


She won’t ask after me, nor care, 
But tell her ev’rything, don’t spare 
Her empty heart; and let her cry ;— 
To her it doesn’t signify.” 


The language is the language of ordinary 
everyday conversation. Every word the officer 
says might have been said by him in ordinary 
life, and there is not a note that jars ; the speech 
is the living speech of conversation without 
being slang: and the result is a poignant 
piece of poetry. Another perhaps still more 
beautiful and touching example is the cradle- 
song which a mother sings to a Cossack baby, 
in which again every word has the native 
savour and homeliness of a Cossack woman’s 
speech, and every feeling expressed is one 
that she would have felt. A third example is 
** Borodino,”’ an account of the famous battle 
told by a veteran, as a veteran would tell it. 
Lermontov’s fishes never talk like big whales. 

All Russian poets have this gift of reality 
of conception and simplicity of treatment in 
a greater or a lesser degree; perhaps none has 
it in such a supreme degree as Lermontov. 
The difference between Pushkin’s style and 
Lermontov’s is that, when you read Pushkin, 


LERMONTOV 123 


you think: “‘ How perfectly and how simply 
that is said! How in the world did he 
do it?” You admire the “magic hand of 
chance.” In reading Lermontov at his 
simplest and best, you do not think about 
the style at all, you simply respond to what 
is said, and the style escapes notice in 
its absolute appropriateness. Thus, what 
Matthew Arnold said about Byron and Words- 
worth is true about Lermontov—there are 
moments when Nature takes the pen from 
his hand and writes for him. 

In Lermontov there is nothing slovenly; 
but there is a great deal that is flat and 
sullen. But if one reviews the great amount 
of work he produced in his short life, one is 
struck, not by its variety, as in the case of 
Pushkin,—it is, on the contrary, limited and 
monotonous in subject,—but by his authentic 
lyrical inspiration, by the strength, the in- 
tensity, the concentration of his genius, the 
richness of his imagination, the wealth of 
his palette, his gorgeous colouring and the 
high level of his strong square musical verse. 
And perhaps more than by anything else, 
one is struck by the blend in his nature 
and his work which has just been discussed, 


124 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


of romantic imagination and stern reality, of 
soaring thought and earthly common-sense, as 
though we had before us the temperament of 
a Thackeray with the wings of a Shelley. 
Lermontov is certainly, whichever way you 
take him, one of the most astonishing figures, 
and certainly the greatest purely lyrical 
Erscheinung in Russian literature. 

With the death of Lermontov in 1841, the 
springtide of national song that began in the 
reign of Alexander I comes to an end; for 
the only poet he left behind him did not 
survive him long. This was his contemporary 
Ko.tsov (1809-42), the greatest of Russian 
folk-poets. The son of a cattle-dealer, after 
a fitful and short-lived primary education at 
the district school of Voronezh, he adopted 
his father’s trade, and by a sheer accident a 
cultivated young man of Moscow came across 
him and his verses, and raised funds for their 
publication. 

Koltsov’s verse paints peasant life as it is, 
without any sentimentality or rhetoric; it is 
described from the inside, and not from the 
outside. This is the great difference between 
Koltsov and other popular poets who came 
later. Moreover, he caught and reproduced 


LERMONTOV 125 


the true Volkston in his lyrics, so that they are 
indistinguishable in accent from real folk- 
poetry. Koltsov sings of the woods, and the 
rustling rye, of harvest time and sowing; the 
song of the love-sick girl reaping; the lonely 
grave; the vague dreams and desires of the 
peasant’s heart. His pictures have the dignity 
and truth of Jean Francois Millet, and his 
** lyrical cry ” is as authentic as that of Burns. 
His more literary poems are like Burns’ 
English poems compared with his work in the 
Scots. But he died the year after Lermontov, 
of consumption, and with his death the cur- 
tain was rung down on the first act of Russian 
literature. When it was next rung up, it was 
on the age of prose. 


CHAPTER IV 
THE AGE OF PROSE 


WHEN the curtain again rose on Russian 
literature it was on an era of prose; and 
the leading protagonist of that era, both 
by his works of fiction and his dramatic 
work, was NicHoLas GoGoL [1809-52]. It is 
true that in the thirties Russia began to 
produce home-made novels. In Pushkin’s 
story The Queen of Spades, when somebody 
asks the old Countess if she wishes to read a 
Russian novel, she says “‘ A Russian novel? 
Are there any?” This stage had been 
passed; but the novels and the plays that 
were produced at this time until the advent 
of Gogol have been—deservedly for the 
greater part—forgotten. And, just as Ler- 
montov was the successor of Pushkin in the 
domain of poetry, so in the domain of satire 
Gogol was the successor of Griboyedov; and 
in creating a national work he was the heir 


of Pushkin. 
126 


THE AGE OF PROSE 127 


Gogol was a Little Russian. He was born 
in 1809 near Poltava, in the Cossack country, 
and was brought up by his grandfather, a 
Cossack; but he left the Ukraine and settled 
in 1829 in St. Petersburg, where he obtained 
a place in a Government office. After an 
unsuccessful attempt to go on the stage, and 
a brief career as tutor, he was given a pro- 
fessorship of History; but he failed here also, 
and finally turned to literature. The publica- 
tion of his first efforts gained him the acquaint- 
ance of the literary men of the day, and he 
became the friend of Pushkin, who proved a 
valuable friend, adviser, and critic, and urged 
him to write on the life of the people. He 
lived in St. Petersburg from 1829 to 1886; 
and it was perhaps home-sickness which 
inspired him to write his Little Russian 
sketches—Evenings on a Farm on the Dikanka,— 
which appeared in 18382, followed by Mir- 
gorod, a second series, in 1834. 

Gogol’s temperament was romantic. He 
had a great deal of the dreamer in him, a 
touch of the eerie, a delight in the super- 
‘natural, an impish fancy that reminds one 
sometimes of Hoffmann and sometimes of 
R. L. Stevenson, as wel] as a deep religious 


128 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


vein which was later on to dominate and oust 
all his other qualities. But, just as we find 
in the Russian poets a curious mixture of 
romanticism and realism, of imagination and 
common-sense, so in Gogol, side by side with 
his imaginative gifts, which were great, there 
is a realism based on minute observation. 
In addition to this, and tempering his pene- 
trating observation, he had a rich streak 
of humour, a many-sided humour, ranging 
from laughter holding both its sides, to a 
delicate and half melancholy chuckle, and in 
his later work to biting irony. 

In the very first story of his first bock, 
*‘ The Fair of Sorochinetz,”’ we are plunged into 
an atmosphere that smells of Russia in a way 
that no other Russian book has ever yet 
savoured of the soil. We are plunged into the 
South, on a blazing noonday, when the corn is 
standing in sheaves and wheat is being sold at 
the fair; and the fair, with its noise, its smell 
and its colour, rises before us as vividly as 
Normandy leaps out of the pages of Maupas- 
sant, or Scotland from the pages of Stevenson. 
And just as Andrew Lang once said that : 
probably only a Scotsman, and a Lowland 
Scotsman. could know how true to life the 


THE AGE OF PROSE 129 


characters in Kidnapped were, so it is probable 
that only a Russian, and indeed a Little Rus- 
sian, appreciates to the full how true to life are 
the people, the talk, and the ambient air in the 
tales of Gogol. And then we at once get that 
hint of the supernatural which runs like a 
scarlet thread through all these stories; the 
rumour that the Red Jacket has been observed 
in the fair; and the Red Jacket, so the gossips 
say, belongs to a little Devil, who being turned 
out of Hell as a punishment for some mis- 
demeanour—probably a goodintention—estab- 
lished himself in a neighbouring barn, and 
from home-sickness took to drink, and drank 
away all his substance; so that he was obliged 
to pawn his red jacket for a year to a Jew, 
who sold it before the year was out, where- 
upon the buyer, recognizing its unholy origin, 
cut it up into bits and threw it away, 
after which the Devil appeared in the shape 
of a pig every year at the fair to find the 
pieces. It is on this Red Jacket that the 
story turns. 

In this first volume, the supernatural plays 
a predominant part throughout; the stories 
tell of water-nymphs, the Devil, who steals 


the moon, witches, magicians, and men who 
I 


130 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


traffic with the Evil One and lose their souls. 
In the second series, Mirgorod, realism comes 
to the fore in the stories of “ The Old- 
Fashioned Landowners ” and “ The Quarrel 
of the Two Ivans.”’ These two stories con- 
tain between them the sum and epitome of 
the whole of one side of Gogol’s genius, the 
realistic side. In the one story, “ The Old- 
Fashioned Landowners,’’ we get the gentle 
good humour which tells the charming tale 
of a South Russian Philemon and Baucis, 
their hospitality and kindliness, and the lone- 
liness of Philemon when Baucis is taken away, 
told with the art of La Fontaine, and with 
many touches that remind one of Dickens. 
The other story, “ The Quarrel of the Two 
Ivans,’’ who are bosom friends and quarrel 
over nothing, and are, after years, on the 
verge of making it up when the mere mention 
of the word “ goose ”’ which caused the quarrel 
sets alight to it once more and irrevocably, 
is in Gogol’s richest farcical vein, with just a 
touch of melancholy. 

And in the same volume, two nouvelles, 
Tarass Bulba and Viy, sum up between them 
the whole of the other side of Gogol’s genius. 
Tarass Bulba, a short historical novel, with 


THE AGE OF PROSE 131 


its incomparably vivid picture of Cossack life, 
is Gogol’s masterpiece in the epic vein. It is 
as strong and as direct as a Border ballad. 
Viy, which tells of a witch, is the most 
creepy and imaginative of his supernatural 
stories. 

Later, he published two more collections of 
stories: Arabesques (1834) and Tales (1836). 
In these, poetry, witches, water-nymphs, 
magicians, devils, and epic adventure are all 
left behind. The element of the fantastic 
still subsists, as in the ‘“ Portrait,’? and of the 
grotesque, as in the story of the major who 
loses his nose, which becomes a separate 
personality, and wanders about the town. 
But his blend of realism and humour comes 
out strongly in the story of ‘‘ The Carriage,” 
and his blend of realism and pathos still 
more strongly in the story of “The Over- 
coat,’’ the story of a minor public servant 
who is always shivering and whose dream 
it is to have a warm overcoat. After years 
of privation he saves enough money to 
buy one, and on the first day he wears it, it 
is stolen. He dies of melancholia, and his 
ghost haunts the streets. This story is the 
only begetter of the large army of pathetic 


132 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


figures of failure that crowd the pages of 
Russian literature. 

While Gogol had been writing and publishing 
these tales, he had also been steadily writing 
for the stage; but here the great difficulty 
and obstacle was the Censorship, which was 
almost as severe as it was in England at the 
end of the reign of Edward VII. But, by a 
curious paradox, the play, which you would 
have expected the Censorship to forbid before 
all other plays, The Revisor, or Inspector- 
General, was performed. This was owing to 
the direct intervention of the Emperor. The 
Revisor is the second comic masterpiece of the 
Russian stage. The plot was suggested to 
Gogol by Pushkin. The officials of an obscure 
country town hear the startling news that a 
Government Inspector is arriving incognito 
to investigate their affairs. A traveller from 
St. Petersburg—a fine natural liar—is taken 
for the Inspector, plays up to the part, 
and gets away just before the arrival of the 
real Inspector, which is the end of the play. 
The play is a satire on the Russian bureau- 
cracy. Almost every single character in it 
is dishonest; and the empty-headed, and 
irrelevant hero, with his magnificent talent 


THE AGE OF PROSE 133 


for easy lying, is a masterly creation. The 
play at once became a classic, and retains all 
its vitality and comic force to-day. There is 
no play which draws a larger audience on 
holidays in St. Petersburg and Moscow. 

After the production of The Revisor, Gogol 
left Russia for ever and settled in Rome. He 
had in his mind a work of great importance 
on which he had already been working for 
some time. This was his Dead Souls, his 
most ambitious work, and his masterpiece. It 
was Pushkin who gave him the idea of the 
book. The hero of the book, Chichikov, 
conceives a brilliant idea. Every landlord 
possessed so many serfs, called “ souls.” 
A revision took place every ten years, and 
the landlord had to pay for poll-tax on 
the ‘‘souls’’ who had died during that period. 
Nobody looked at the lists between the 
periods of revision. Chichikov’s idea was to 
take over the dead souls from the landlord, 
who would, of course, be delighted to be rid 
of the fictitious property and the real tax, 
to register his purchases, and then to mortgage 
at a bank at St. Petersburg or Moscow, the 
*“ souls,” which he represented as being in 
some place in the Crimea, and thus make 


134 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


money enough to buy “souls” of, his own. 


The book tells of the adventures of Chichikov 
as he travels over Russia in search of dead 
** souls,” and is, like Mr. Pickwick’s adventures, 
an Odyssey, introducing us to every kind and 
manner of man and woman. The book was 
to be divided in three parts. The first 
part appeared in 1842. Gogol went on 
working at the second and third parts until 
1852, when he died. He twice threw the 
second part of the work into the fire when it 
was finished; so that all we possess is the 
first part, and the second part printed from an 
incomplete manuscript. The second part was 
certainly finished when he destroyed it, and 
it is probable that the third part was sketched. 
He had intended in the second part to work 
out the moral regeneration of Chichikov, and 
to give to the world his complete message. 
Persecuted by a dream he was unable to realize 
and an ambition which he was not able to 
fulfil, Gogol was driven inwards, and his natural 
religious feeling grew more intense and made 
him into an ascetic and a recluse. This break 
in the middle of his career is characteristic of 
Russia. Tolstoy, of course, furnishes the most 
typical example of the same thing. But it is 


THE AGE OF PROSE 135 


a common Russian characteristic for men 
midway in a successful career to turn aside 
from it altogether, and seek consolation in 
the things which are not of this world. 
Gogol’s Dead Souls made a deep impression 
upon educated Russia. It pleased the en- 
thusiasts for Western Europe by its reality, 
its artistic conception and execution, and by its 
social ideas; and it pleased the Slavophile 
Conservatives by its truth to life, and by its 
smell of Russia. When the first chapter was 
read aloud to Pushkin, he said, when Gogol 
had finished: “God, what a sad country 
Russia is!” And it is certainly true, that 
amusing as the book is, inexpressibly comic 
as so many of the scenes are, Gogol does 
not flatter his country or his countrymen; 
and when Russians read it at the time it 
appeared, many must have been tempted 
to murmur “ doux pays !”—as they would, 
indeed, now, were a writer with the genius 
of a Gogol to appear and describe the ad- 
ventures of a modern Chichikov; for, though 
circumstances may be entirely different, al- 
though there are no more “souls” to be 
bought or sold, Chichikov is still alive— 
and as Gogol said, there was probably not 


136 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


one of his readers who after an honest self- 
examination, would not wonder if he had 
not something of Chichikov in him, and who 
if he were to meet an acquaintance at that 
moment, would not nudge his companion and 
say: “There goes Chichikov.” ‘‘ And who 
and what is Chichikov?”’ Theansweris: “A 
scoundrel.’ But such an entertaining scoun- 
drel, so abject, so shameless, so utterly devoid 
of self-respect, such a magnificent liar, so 
plausible an impostor, so ingenious a cheat, 
that he rises from scoundrelism almost to 
greatness. 

There is, indeed, something of the greatness 
of Falstaff in this trafficker of dead “ souls.” 
His baseness is almost sublime. Hein any 
case merits a place in the gallery of humanity’s 
typical and human rascals, where Falstaff, 
Tartuffe, Pecksniff, and Count Fosco reign. 
He has the great saving merit of being human; 
nor can he be accused of hypocrisy. His 
coachman, Selifan, who got drunk with every 
‘“* decent man,” is worthy of the creator of 
Sam Weller. But what distinguishes Gogol 
in his Dead Souls from the great satirists of 
other nations, and his satire from the sacva 
indignatio of Swift, for instance, is that, after 


THE AGE OF PROSE 137 


laying bare to the bones the rascality of his 
hero, he turns round on his audience and tells 
them that there is no cause for indignation ; 
Chichikov is only a victim of a ruling passion 
—gain; perhaps, indeed, in the chill exist- 
ence of a Chichikov, there may be something 
which will one day cause us to humble our- 
selves on our knees and in the dust before the 
Divine Wisdom. His irony is lined with 
indulgence; his sleepless observation is tem- 
pered by fundamental charity. He sees what 
is mean and common clearer than any one, 
but he does not infer from it that life, or man- 
kind, or the world is common or mean. He 
infers the opposite. He puts Chichikov no 
lower morally than he would put Napoleon, 
Harpagon, or Don Juan—all of them victims 
of a ruling passion, and all of them great by 
reason of it—for Chichikov is also great in 
rascality, just as Harpagon was great in 
avarice, and Don Juan great in profligacy. 
And this large charity blent with biting irony 
is again peculiarly Russian. 

Dead Souls is a deeper book than any of 
Gogol’s early work. It is deep in the same 
way as Don Quixote is deep; and like Don 
Quixote it makes boys laugh, young men 


138 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


think, and old men weep. Apart from its 
philosophy and ideas, Dead Souls had a great 
influence on Russian literature as a work of 
art. Just as Pushkin set Russian poetry free 
from the high-flown and the conventional, so 
did Gogo] set Russian fiction free from the 
dominion of the grand style. He carried 
Pushkin’s work—the work which Pushkin 
had accomplished in verse and adumbrated 
in prose—much further; and by depicting 
ordinary life, and by writing a novel without 
any love interest, with a Chichikov for a 
hero, he created Russian realism. He de- 
scribed what he saw without flattery and 
without exaggeration, but with the masterly 
touch, the instinctive economy, the sense of 
selection of a great artist. 

This, at the time it was done, was a revolu- 
tion. Nobody then would have dreamed it 
possible to write a play or a novel without 
a love-motive; and just as Pushkin revealed 
to Russia that there was such a thing as 
Russian landscape, Gogol again, going one 
better, revealed the fascination, the secret 
and incomprehensible power that lay in the 
flat monotony of the Russian country, and the 
inexhaustible source of humour, absurdity, 


THE AGE OF PROSE 139 


irony, quaintness, farce, comedy in the 
everyday life of the ordinary people. So 
that, however much his contemporaries might 
differ as to the merits or demerits, the harm 
or the beneficence, of his work, he left his 
nation with permanent and classic models of 
prose and fiction and stories, just as Pushkin 
had bequeathed to them permanent models 
of verse. 

Gogol wrote no more fiction after Dead 
Souls. In 1847 Passages from a Correspond- 
ence with a Friend was published, which 
created a sensation, because in the book 
Gogol preached submission to the Govern- 
ment, both spiritual and temporal. The 
Western enthusiasts and the Liberals in 
general were highly disgusted. One can 
understand their disgust; it is less easy to 
understand their surprise; for Gogol had 
never pretended to be a Liberal. He showed 
up the evils of Bureaucracy and the follies and 
weaknesses of Bureaucrats, because they were 
there, just as he showed up the stinginess 
of misers and the obstinacy of old women. 
But it is quite as easy for a Conservative 
to do this as it is for a Liberal, and quite as 
easy for an orthodox believer as for an atheist. 


140 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


But Gogol’s contemporaries had not realized 
the tempest that had been raging for a long 
time in Gogol’s soul, and which he kept to 
himself. He had always been religious, and 
now he became exclusively religious; he made 
a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; he spent his 
substance in charity, especially to poor 
students; and he lived in asceticism until he 
died, at the age of forty-three. What a waste, 
one is tempted to say—and how often one is 
tempted to say this in the annals of Russian 
literature—and yet, one wonders ! 

What we possess of the second part of 
Dead Souls is in Gogol’s best vein, and of 
course one cannot help bitterly regretting that 
the rest was destroyed or possibly never 
written; but one wonders whether, had he 
not had within him the intensity of feeling 
which led him ultimately to renounce art, 
he would have been the artist that he was; 
whether he would have been capable of creat- 
ing so many-coloured a world of characters, 
and whether the soil out of which those works 
grew was not in reality the kind of soil out 
of which religious renunciation was at last 
bound to flower. However that may be, 
Gogol left behind him a rich inheritance. He 


THE AGE OF PROSE 141 


is one of the great humorists of European 
literature, and whoever gives England a 
really fine translation of his work, will do 
his country a service. Mérimée places Gogol 
among the best English humorists. His 
humour and his pathos were closely allied; 
but there is no acidity in his irony. His work 
may sometimes sadden you, but (as in the 
case of Krylov’s two pigeons) it will never 
bore you, and it will never leave you with a 
feeling of stale disgust or a taste as of sharp 
alum, for his work is based on charity, and it 
has in its form and accent the precious gift 
of charm. Gogol is an author who will always 
be loved even as much as he is admired, and 
his stories are a boon to the young; to 
many a Russian boy and girl the golden gates 
of romance have been opened by Gogol, the 
destroyer of Russian romanticism. the in- 
augurator of Russian realism. 

Side by side with fiction, another element 
grew up in this age of prose, namely criticism. 
Karamzin in the twenties had been the first 
to introduce literary criticism, and critical 
appreciations of Pushkin’s work appeared 
from time to time in the European Messenger. 
PRINCE VyAzEMSsKy, whose literary activity 


142 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


lasted from 1808-78, was a critic as well 
as a poet and a satirist, a fine example of the 
type of great Russian nobles so frequent in 
Russian books, who were not only satur- 
ated with culture but enriched literature with 
their work, and carried on the tradition of 
cool, clear wit, clean expression, and winged 
phrase that we find in Griboyedov. PoLEvoy, 
a self-educated man o! humble extraction, 
was the first professional journalist, and 
created the tradition of violent and fiery 
polemics, which has lasted till this day in 
Russian journalism. But the real founder of 
Russian esthetic, literary, and journalistic 
criticism was Bernsky (1811-1847). 

Like Polevoy, he was of humble extraction 
and almost entirely self-educated. He lived 
in want and poverty and ill-health. His life 
was a long battle against every kind of 
difficulty and obstacle; his literary produc- 
tion was more than hampered by the Censor-— 
ship, but his influence was far-reaching and 
deep. He created Russian criticism, and 
after passing through several phases—a Ger- 
man phase of Hegelian philosophy, Gallo- 
phobia, enthusiasm for Shakespeare and 
Goethe and for objective art, a French 


Eee << =” 


THE AGE OF PROSE 143 


phase of enthusiasm for art as practised in 
France, ended finally in a didactic phase of 
which the watchword was that Life was more 
important than Art. 

The first blossoms of the new generation 
of writers, Goncharov, Dostoyevsky, Herzen, 
and others, grew up under his encouragement. 
He expounded Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, 
Griboyedov, Zhukovsky and the writers of the 
past. His judgments have remained authori- 
tative; but some of his final judgments, which 
were unshaken for generations, such as for 
instance his estimates of Pushkin and Lermon- 
tov, were much biassed and coloured by his 
didacticism. He burnt what he had adored 
in the case of Gogol, who, like Pushkin, became 
for him too much of an artist, and not enough 
of asocial reformer. Whatever phase Belinsky 
went through, he was passionate, impulsive, 
and violent, incapable of being objective, or of 
doing justice to an opponent, or of seeing two 
sides to a question. He was a polemical and 
fanatical knight errant, the prophet and 
propagandist of Western influence, the bitter 
enemy of the Slavophiles. 

The didactic stamp which he gave to Russian 
zesthetic and literary criticism has remained 


144 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


on it ever since, and differentiates it from the 
literary and esthetic criticism of the rest of 
Europe, not only from that school of criticism 
which wrote and writes exclusively under the 
banner of ‘*‘ Art for Art’s Sake,” but from 
those Western critics who championed the 
importance of moral ideas in literature, just as 
ardently as he did himself, and who deprecated 
the theory of Art for Art’s sake just as strongly. 
Thus it is that, from the beginning of Russian 
criticism down to the present day, a truly 
objective criticism scarcely exists in Russian 
literature. Austhetic criticism becomes a 
political weapon. “ Are you in my camp?” 
if so, you are a good writer. ‘Are you in 
my opponent’s camp?” then your god-gifted 
genius is mere dross. 

The reason of this has been luminously stated 
by Professor Briickner: ‘To the intelligent 
Russian, without a free press, without the 
liberty of assembly, without the right to free 
expression of opinion, literature became the 
last refuge of freedom of thought, the only 
means of propagating higher ideas. He ex- 
pected of his country’s literature not merely 
esthetic recreation; he placed it at the service 
of his aspirations. . .. Hence the striking 


THE AGE OF PROSE 145 


partiality, nay unfairness, displayed by the 
Russians towards the most perfect works of 
their own literature, when they did not re- 
spond to the aims or expectations of their 
party or their day.” And speaking of the 
criticism that was produced after 1855, he 
says: “ This criticism is often, in spite of all 
its giftedness, its ardour and fire, only a 
mockery of all criticism. The work only 
serves as an example on which to hang the 
critics’ own views. . .. This is no reproach; we 
simply state the fact, and fully recognize the 
necessity and usefulness of the method. With 
a backward society, . . . this criticism was a 
means which was sanctified by the end, the 
spreading of free opinions. . . . Unhappily, 
Russian literary criticism has remained till 
to-day almost solely journalistic, 7. e. didactic 
and partisan. See how even now it treats 
the most interesting, exceptional, and mighty 
of all Russians, Dostoyevsky, merely because 
he does not fit into the Radical mould! How 
unjust it has been towards others! How it 
has extolled to the clouds the representatives 
ofitsowncamp!’’ I quote Professor Briickner, 
lest I should be myself suspected of being 


partial in this question. The question, per- 
K 


146 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


haps, may admit of further expansion. It is 
not that the Russian critics were merely con- 
vinced it was all-important that art should 
have ideas at the roots of it, and had no 
_ patience with a merely shallow estheticism. 
They went further; the ideas had to be of 
one kind. <A definite political tendency had 
to be discerned; and if the critic disagreed 
with that political tendency, then no amount 
of qualities—not artistic excellence, form, 
skill, style, not even genius, inspiration, depth, 
feeling, philosophy—were recognized. 

Herein lies the great difference between 
Russian and Western critics, between Sainte- 
Beuve and Belinsky ; between Matthew Arnold 
and his Russian contemporaries. Matthew 
Arnold defined the highest poetry as being a 
criticism of life; but that would not have 
prevented him from doing justice either to 
a poet so polemical as Byron, or to a poet so 
completely unpolitical, so sheerly esthetic 
as Keats; to Lord Beaconsfield as a novelist, 
to Mr. Morley or Lord Acton as historians, 
because their “‘ tendency ”’ or their “‘ politics ” 
were different from his own. The most 
biassed of English or French critics is broad- 
minded compared to a Russian critic. Had 


THE AGE OF PROSE 147 


Keats been a Russian poet, Belinsky would 
have swept him away with contempt; Words- 
worth would have been condemned as re- 
actionary ; and Swinburne’s politics alone 
would have been taken into consideration. 
At the present day, almost ten years after Pro- 
fessor Briickner wrote his History of Russian 
Literature, now that the press is more or less 
free, save for occasional pin-pricks, now that 
literary output is in any case unfettered, and . 
the stage freer than it is in England, the same 
criticism still applies. Russian literary criti- 
cism is still journalistic. There are and there 
always have been brilliant exceptions, of 
course, two of the most notable of which are 
VoLynsky and MEREZHKOVSKyY; but as arule 
the political camp to which the writer be- 
longs is the all-important question ; and I know 
cases of Russian politicians who have been 
known to refuse to write, even in foreign re- 
views, because they disapproved of the “ ten- 
dency ” of those reviews, the tendency being 
non-existent—as is generally the case with 
English reviews,—and the review harbouring 
opinions of every shade and tendency. You 
would think that narrow-mindedness could no 
further go than to refuse to let your work 


148 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


appear in an impartial organ, lest in that same 
organ an opinion opposed to your own might 
appear also. But the cause of this is the same 
now as it used to be, namely that, in spite of 
there being a greater measure of freedom in 
Russia, political liberty does not yet exist. 
Liberty of assembly does not exist; liberty of 
conscience only partially exists; the press is 
annoyed and hampered by restrictions; and 
the great majority of Russian writers are still 
engaged in fighting for these things, and 
therefore still ready to sacrifice fairness for 
the greater end,—the achievement of political 
freedom. 

Thus criticism in Russia became a question 
of camps, and the question arises, what were 
these camps? From the dawn of the age of 
pure literature, Russia was divided into two 
great camps: The Slavophiles and _ the 
Propagandists of Western Ideas. 

The trend towards the West began with 
the influence of Joseph Le Maistre and the 
St. Petersburg Jesuits. In 18386, CHAapaAry, 
an ex-guardsman who had served in the 
Russian campaign in France and travelled a 
great deal in Western Kurope, and who shared 
Joseph Le Maistre’s theory that Russia had 


THE AGE OF PROSE 149 


suffered by her isolation from the West and 
through the influence of the former Byzantine 
Empire, published the first of his Lettres sur 
la Philosophie de Histoire in the Telescope of 
Moscow. This letter came like a bomb-shell. 
He glorified the tradition and continuity of the 
Catholic world. He said that Russia existed, 
as it were, outside of time, without the tradition 
either of the Orient or of the Occident, and that 
the universal culture of the human race had 
not touched it. ‘“‘ The atmosphere of the 
West produces ideas of duty, law, justice, 
order; we have given nothing to the world 
and taken nothing from it; ... we have 
not contributed anything to the progress of 
humanity, and we have disfigured everything 
we have taken from that progress. Hostile 
circumstances have alicnated us from the 
general trend in which the social idea of 
Christianity grew up; thus we ought to revise 
our faith, and begin our education over again 
on another basis.”’ The expression of these 
incontrovertible sentiments resulted in the 
exile of the editor of the Telescope, the dis- 
missal of the Censor, and in the official 
declaration of Chaadaev’s insanity, who was 
put under medical supervision for a year. 


150 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


Chaadaev made disciples who went further 
than he did, Princess VoLKoNSKy, the 
authoress of a notable book on the Orthodox 
Church, and Prince GAcaRIn, who both be- 
came Catholics. This was one branch of Wes- 
ternism. Another branch, to which Belinsky 
belonged, had no Catholic leanings, but 
sought for salvation in socialism and atheism. 
The most important figure in this branch is 
ALEXANDER HERZEN (1812-1870). His real 
name was Yakovlev; his father, a wealthy 
nobleman, married in Germany, but did not 
legalize his marriage in Russia, so his children 
took their mother’s name. 

Herzen’s career belongs rather to the history 
of Russia than to the history of Russian litera- 
ture; were it not that, besides being one of the 
greatest and most influential personalities of 
his time, he was a great memoir-writer. He 
began, after a mathematical training at the 
University, with fiction, of which the best 
example is a novel Who is to Blame? which 
paints the génie sans portefeuille of the 
period that Turgenev was so fond of depicting. 
Herzen was exiled on account of his oral pro- 
paganda, first to Perm, and then to Vyatka. 
In 1847, he left Russia for ever, and lived 


THE AGE OF PROSE Pol 


abroad for the rest of his life, at first in Paris, 
and aiterwards in London, where he edited a 
newspaper called The Bell. 

Herzen was a Socialist. Western Europe 
he considered to be played out. He looked 
upon Socialism as a new religion and a new 
form of Christianity, which would be to the 
new world what Christianity had been to the 
old. The Russian peasants would play the 
part of the Invasion of the Barbarians; and 
the functions of the State would be taken 
over by the Russian Communes on a basis of 
voluntary and mutual agreement—the prin- 
ciple of the Commune, of sharing all posses- 
sions in common, being so near the funda- 
mental principle of Christianity. 

** A thinking Russian,” he wrote, “is the 
most independent being in the world. What 
can stop him? Consideration for the past? 
But what is the starting-point of modern 
Russian history if it be not a total negation 
of nationalism and tradition? . . . What do 
we care, disinherited minors that we are, for 
the duties you have inherited? Can your 
worn-out morality satisfy us? Your morality 
which is neither Christian nor human, which 
is used only in copybooks and for the ritual 


152 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


of the law?” Again: ‘“‘ We are free because 
we begin with our own liberation; we are 
independent; we have nothing to lose or to 
honour. A Russian will never be a protestant, 
or follow the juste milieu... our civiliza- 
tion is external, our corrupt morals quite 
crude.” 

The great point Herzen was always making 
was that Russia had escaped the baleful tradi- 
tion of Western Europe, and the hereditary 
infection of Western corruption. Thus, in his 
disenchantment with Western society and 
his enthusiasm for the communal ownership 
of land, he was at one with the Slavophiles; 
where he differed from them was in accepting 
certain Western ideas, and in thinking that a 
new order of things, a new heaven and 
earth, could be created by a social revolution, 
which should be carried out by the Slavs. 
His influence—he was one of the precursors 
of Nihilism, for the seed he sowed, falling on 
the peculiar soil where it fell, produced the 
whirlwind as a harvest—belongs to history. 
What belongs to literature are his memoirs, 
My Past and my Thoughts (Byloe 1 Dumy), 
which were written between 1852 and 1855. 


THE AGE OF PROSE 153 


These memoirs of everyday life and encounters 
with all sorts and conditions of extraordinary 
men are in their subject-matter as exciting 
as a novel, and, in their style, on a level with 
the masterpieces of Russian prose, through 
their subtle psychology, interest, wit, and 
artistic form. 

Herzen lived to see his ideas bearing fruit 
in the one way which of all others he would 
have sought to avoid, namely in “‘ militancy ” 
and terrorism. When in 1866, an attempt was 
made by Karakozov to assassinate Alex- 
ander II, and Herzen wrote an article repudiat- 
ing all political assassinations as barbarous, the 
revolutionary parties solemnly denounced him 
and his newspaper. The Bell, which had 
already lost its popularity owing to Herzen’s 
pro-Polish sympathies in 18638, ceased to have 
any circulation. Thus he lived to see his vast 
hopes shattered, the seed he had sown bearing 
a fruit he distrusted, his dreams of regenera- 
tion burst like a bubble, his ideals exploited 
by unscrupulous criminals. He died in 1870, 
leaving a name which is as great in Russian 
literature as it is remarkable in Russian 
history. 


154 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


Turning now to the Slavophiles, their idea 
was that Russia was already in possession of 
the best possible institutions,—orthodoxy, 
autocracy, and communal ownership, and 
that the West had everything to learn from 
Russia. They pointed to the evils arising 
from the feudal and aristocratic state, the 
system of primogeniture in the West, the 
higher legal status of women in Russia, and 
the superiority of a communal system, which 
leads naturally to a Consultative National 
Assembly with unanimous decisions, over 
the parliaments and party systems of the 
West. 

The leader of the Slavophiles was Hom- 
YAKOV, a man of great culture; a dialectician, 
a poet, and an impassioned defender of 
orthodoxy. The best of his lyrics, which are 
inspired by a profound love of his country 
and belief in it, have great depth of feeling. 
Besides Homyakov, there were other poets, 
such as TyuTcHEV and Ivan AxsaKkov. Just 
as the camp of Reform produced in Herzen 
a supreme writer of memoirs, that of the 
Slavophiles also produced a unique memoir 
writer in the Serce Axsaxov, the father of 


THE AGE OF PROSE 155 


the poet (1791-1859), who published his 
Family Chronicle in_1856, and who describes 
the life of the end of the eighteenth century, 
and the age of Alexander. This book, one of 
the most valuable historical documents in 
Russian, and a priceless collection of bio- 
graphical portraits, is also a gem of Russian 
prose, exact in its observation, picturesque 
and perfectly balanced in its diction. 

Aksakov remembered with unclouded dis- 
tinctness exactly what he had seen in his child- 
hood, which he spent in the district of Orenburg. 
He paints the portraits of his grandfather and 
his great-aunt. We see every detail of the 
life of a backwoodsman of the days of 
Catherine II. We see the noble of those days, 
simple and rustic in his habits as a peasant, 
almost entirely unlettered, and yet a gentle- 
man through and through, unswerving in 
maintaining the standard of morals and 
traditions which he considers due to his ancient 
lineage. We see every hour of the day of his 
life in the country; we hear all the details of 
the family life, the marriage of his son, the 
domestic troubles of his sister. 

What strikes one most, perhaps, besides 


156 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


the contrast between the primitive simplicity 
of the habits and manners of the life described, 
and the astoundingly gentlemanlike feelings of 
the man who leads this quiet and rustic life in 
remote and backward conditions, is that there 
is not a hint or suspicion of anything anti- 
quated in the sentiments and opinions we see 
at play. The story of Aksakov’s grandfather 
might be that of any country gentleman in 
any country, at any epoch, making allowances 
for a certain difference in manners and 
customs and conditions which were peculiar 
to the epoch in question, the existence of 
serfdom, for instance—although here, too, the 
feeling with regard to manners described is 
startlingly like the ideal of good manners of 
any epoch, although the meurs are sometimes 
different. The story is as vivid and as inter- 
esting as that of any novel, as that of the 
novels of Russian writers of genius, and it 
has the additional value of being true. And 
yet we never feel that Aksakov has a thought 
of compiling a historical document for the 
sake of its historical interest. He is making 
history unawares, just as Monsieur Jourdain 
talked prose without knowing it; and, 


THE AGE OF PROSE 157 


whether he was aware of it or not, he wrote 
perfect prose. No more perfect piece of 
prose writing exists. The style flows on like 
a limpid river; there is nothing superfluous, 
and not a hesitating touch. It is impossible 
to put down the narrative after once be- 
ginning it, and I have heard of children who 
read it like a fairy-tale. One has the sensa- 
tion, in reading it, of being told a story by 
some enchanting nurse, who, when the usual 
question, “Is it true?” is put to her, could 
truthfully answer, “‘ Yes, it is true.’ The 
pictures of nature, the portraits of the people, 
all the good and all the bad of the good and 
the bad old times pass before one with epic 
simplicity and the magic of a fairy-tale. One 
is spellbound by the charm, the dignity, the 
good-nature, the gentle, easy accent of the 
speaker, in whom one feels convinced not only 
that there was nothing common nor mean, 
but to whom nothing was common or mean, 
who was a gentleman by character as well 
as by lineage, one of God’s as well as one of 
Russia’s nobility. 

There is no book in Russian which, for its 
entrancing interest as well as for its historical 


158 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


value, so richly deserves translation into 
English; only such a translation should be 
made by a stylist—that is, by a man who 
knows how to speak and write his mother 
tongue perspicuously and simply. 


CHAPTER V 
THE EPOCH OF REFORM 


For seven years after the death of Belinsky 
in 1848, all literary development ceased. This 
period was the darkest hour before the dawn 
of the second great renascence of Russian 
literature. Criticism was practically non- 
existent; the Slavophiles were forbidden to 
write; the Westernizers were exiled. An 
increased severity of censorship, an extreme 
suspicion and drastic measures on the part 
of the Government were brought about by 
the fears which the Paris revolution of 1848 
had caused. The Westernizers felt the 
effects of this as much as the Slavophiles; 
a group of young literary men, schoolmasters 
and officers, the Petrashevtsy, called after 
their leader, a Foreign Office official Perra- 
SHEVSKy, met together on Fridays and de- 
bated on abstract subjects; they discussed 
the emancipation of the serfs, read Fourier 


and Lamennais, and considered the estab- 
159 


160 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


lishment of a secret press: the scheme of a 
popular propaganda was thought of, but 
nothing had got beyond talk—and the whole 
thing was in reality only talk—when. the 
society was discovered by the police and its 
members were punished with the utmost 
severity. Twenty-one of them were con- 
demned to death, among whom was Dostoyev- 
sky, who, being on the army list, was accused 
of treason. They were reprieved on the scaf- 
fold; some sent into penal servitude in Siberia, 
and some into the army. This marked one of 
the darkest hours in the history of Russian 
literature. And from this date until 1855, 
complete stagnation reigned. In 1855 the 
Kmperor Nicholas died during the Crimean 
War; and with the accession of his son 
Alexander ITI, a new era dawned on Russian 
literature, the Era of the Great Reforms. 
The Crimean War and the reforms which 
followed it—the emancipation of the serfs, 
the creation of a new judicial system, and 
the foundation of local self-government— 
stabbed the Russian soul into life, relieved 
it of its gag, produced a great outburst of 
literature which enlarged and enriched the 
literature of the world, and gave to the 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 161 


world three of its greatest novelists : Turgenev, 
Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. 

Ivan TuRGENEV (1816-83), whose name is 
of Tartar origin, came of an old family which 
had frequently distinguished itself in the 
annals of Russian literature by a fearless 
outspokenness. He began his literary career 
by writing verse (1843); but, like Maupassant, 
he soon understood that verse was not his 
true vehicle, and in 1847 gave up writing 
verse altogether; in that year he published 
in The Contemporary his first sketch of 
peasant life, Khor and Kalinych, which after- 
wards formed part of his Sportsman’s Sketches, 
twenty-four of which he collected and pub- 
lished in 1852. The Government rendered 
Turgenev the same service as it had done to 
Pushkin, in exiling him to his own country 
estate for two years. When, after the two 
years, this forced exile came to an end, he 
went into another kind of exile of his own 
accord; he lived at first at Baden, and then 
in Paris, and only reappeared in Russia from 
time to time; this accounts for the fact that, 
although Turgenev belongs chronologically 
to the epoch of the great reforms, the Russia 


which he paints was really more like the 
L 


162 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


Russia before that epoch; and when he tried 
to paint the Russia that was contemporary to 
him his work gave rise to much controversy. 

His Rudin was published in 1856, The 
Nest of Gentlefolk in 1859, On the Eve in 1860, 
Fathers and Sons in 1862, Smoke in 1867. 
Turgenev did for Russian literature what 
Byron did for English literature; he led 
the genius of Russia on a pilgrimage through- 
out all Europe. And in Europe his work 
reaped a glorious harvest of praise. Flaubert 
was astounded by him, George Sand looked 
up to him as to a Master, Taine spoke of his 
work as being the finest artistic production 
since Sophocles. In Turgenev’s work, Europe 
not only discovered Turgenev, but it dis- 
covered Russia, the simplicity and the natural- 
ness of the Russian character; and this came 
as a revelation. For the first time, Europe 
came across the Russian woman whom Push- 
kin was the first to paint; for the first time 
Kurope came into contact with the Russian 
soul; and it was the sharpness of this revela- 
tion which accounts for the fact of Turgenev 
having received in the West an even greater 
meed of praise than he was perhaps entitled 
to. 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 163 


In Russia, Turgenev attained almost in- 
stant popularity. His Sportsman’s Sketches 
made him known, and his Nest of Gentlefolk 
made him not only famous but universally 
popular. In 1862 the publication of his 
masterpiece Fathers and Sons dealt his repu- 
tation a blow. The revolutionary elements 
in Russia regarded his hero, Bazarov, as a 
calumny and a libel; whereas the reactionary 
elements in Russia looked upon Fathers and 
Sons as a glorification of Nihilism. Thus he 
satisfied nobody. He fell between two stools. 
This, perhaps, could only happen in Russia 
to this extent; and for the same reason as 
that which made Russian criticism didactic. 
The conflicting elements of Russian society 
were so terribly in earnest in fighting their 
cause, that any one whom they did not regard 
as definitely for them was at once considered 
an enemy, and an impartial delineation of 
any character concerned in the political 
struggle was bound to displease both parties. 
If a novelist drew a Nihilist, he must either be 
a hero or a scoundrel, if either the revolution- 
aries or the reactionaries were to be pleased. 
If in England the militant suffragists suddenly 
had a huge mass of educated opinion behind 


164 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


them and a still larger mass of educated public 
opinion against them, and some one were to 
draw in a novel an impartial picture of a 
suffragette, the same thing would happen. 
On a small scale, as far as the suffragettes 
are concerned, it has happened in the case 
of Mr. Wells. But, if Turgenev’s popularity 
suffered a shock in Russia from which it with 
difficulty recovered, in Western Europe it 
went on increasing. Especially in England, 
Turgenev became the idol of all that was 
eclectic, and admiration for Turgenev a 
hall-mark of good taste. 

In Russia, Turgenev’s work recovered from 
the unpopularity caused by his Fathers and 
Sons when Nihilism became a thing of the 
past, and revolution took an entirely different 
shape; but, with the growing up of new 
generations, his popularity suffered in a 
different way and for different reasons. A 
new element came into Russian literature with 
Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and later with Gorky, 
and Turgenev’s work began to seem thin and 
artificial beside the creations of these stronger 
writers; but in Russia, where Turgenev’s 
work has the advantage of being read in the 
original, it had an asset which ensured it a 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 165 


permanent and safe harbour, above and 
beyond the fluctuations of literary taste, the 
strife of political parties, and the conflict of 
social ideals; and that was its art, its poetry, 
its style, which ensured it a lasting and im- 
perishable niche among the great classics of 
Russian literature. And there it stands now. 
Turgenev’s work in Russia is no longer dis- 
puted or a subject of dispute. It is taken 
for granted; and, whatever the younger 
generation will read and admire, they will 
always read and admire Turgenev first. His 
work is a necessary part of the intellectual 
baggage of any educated man and, especially, 
of the educated adolescent. 

The position of Tennyson in England offers 
in a sense a parallel to that of Turgenev in 
Russia. Tennyson, like Turgenev, enjoyed 
during his lifetime not only the popularity 
of the masses, but the appreciation of all that 
was most eclectic in the country. Then a 
reaction set in. Now I believe the young 
generation think nothing of Tennyson at all. 
And yet nothing is so sure as his permanent 
place in English literature; and that per- 
manent place is secured to him by his in- 
comparable diction. So it is with Turgenev. 


166 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


One cannot expect the younger generation 
to be wildly excited about Turgenev’s ideas, 
characters, and problems. They belong to an 
epoch which is dead. At the same time, one 
cannot help thinking that the most advanced 
of the symbolist writers would not have been 
sorry had he happened by chance to write 
Bezhin Meadow and the Poems in Prose. 
Just so one cannot help thinking that the 
most modern of our poets, had he by accident 
written The Revenge or Tears, Idle Tears, 
would not have thrown them in the fire ! 
There is, indeed, something in common 
between Tennyson and Turgenev. They both 
have something mid-Victorian in them. They 
are both idyllic, and both of them landscape- 
lovers and lords of language. They neither of 
them had any very striking message to preach ;_ 
they both of them seem to halt, except on rare 
occasions, on the threshold of passion; they 
both of them have a rare stamp of nobility ; and 
in both of them there is an element of banality. 
They both seem to a certain extent to be shut 
off from the world by the trees of old parks, 
where cultivated people are enjoying the air 
and the flowers and the shade, and where 
between the tall trees you get glimpses of 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 167 


silvery landscapes and limpid waters, and 
soft music comes from the gliding boat. Of 
course, there is more than this in Turgenev, 
but this is the main impression. 

Pathos he has, of the finest, and passion he 
describes beautifully from the outside, making 
you feel its existence, but not convincing you 
that he felt it himself; but on the other hand 
what an artist he is! How beautifully his 
pictures are painted; and how rich he is in 
poetic feeling ! 

Turgenev is above all things a poet. He 
carried on the work of Pushkin, and he did 
for Russian prose what Pushkin did for 
Russian poetry; he created imperishable 
models of style. His language has the same 
limpidity and absence of any blur that we 
find in Pushkin’s work. His women have 
the same crystal radiance, transparent sim- 
plicity, and unaffected strength; his pictures 
of peasant life, and his country episodes 
have the same truth to nature; as an artist 
he had a severe sense of proportion, a per- 
fect purity of outline, and an absolute har- 
mony between the thought and the expres- 
sion. Now that modern Europe and England 
have just begun to discover Dostoyevsky, it is 


168 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


possible that a reaction will set in to the 
detriment of Turgenev. Indeed, to a certain 
extent this reaction has set in in Western 
Europe, as M. Haumant, one of Turgenev’s 
ablest critics and biographers, pointed out not 
long ago. And, as the majority of English- 
men have not the advantage of reading 
him in the original, they will be unchecked 
in this reaction, if it comes about, by their 
appreciation of what is perhaps most durable 
in his work. Yet to translate Turgenev ade- 
quately, it would require an English poet 
gifted with a sense of form and of words as 
rare as that of Turgenev himself. However 
this may be, there is no doubt about the 
importance of Turgenev in the history of 
Russian literature, whatever the future genera- 
tions in Russia or in Europe may think of his 
work. He was a great novelist besides being 
a great poet. Certainly he never surpassed 
his early Sportsman’s Sketches in freshness 
of inspiration and the perfection of artistic 
execution. 

His Bezhin Meadow, where the children 
tell each other bogey stories in the evening, 
is a gem with which no other European litera- 
ture has anything to compare. The Singers, 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 169 


Death, and many others are likewise incom- 
parable. The Nest of Gentlefolk, to which — 
Turgenev owed his great popularity, is quite 
perfect of its kind, with its gallery of portraits 
going back to the eighteenth century and to 
the period of Alexander I; its lovable, human 
hero Lavretsky, and Liza, a fit descendant of 
Pushkin’s Tatiana, radiant as a star. All 
Turgenev’s characters are alive; but, with 
the exception of his women and the hero of 
Fathers and Sons, they are alive in bookland 
rather than in real life. 

George Meredith’s characters, for instance, 
are alive, but they belong to a land or rather 
a planet of his own making, and we should 
never recognize Sir Willoughby Patterne in the 
street, but we do meet women sometimes who 
remind us of Clara Middleton and Carinthia 
Jane. The same is true with regard to 
Turgeney, although it is not another planet 
he created, but a special atmosphere and epoch 
to which his books exclusively belong, and 
which some critics say never existed at all. 
That is of no consequence. It exists for us 
in his work. 

But perhaps what gave rise to accusations 
of unreality and caricature against Turgenev’s 


170 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


characters, apart from the intenser reality 
of Tolstoy’s creations, by comparison with 
which Turgenev’s suffered, was that Turgenev, 
while professing to describe the present, and 
while believing that he was describing the 
present, was in reality painting an epoch 
that was already dead. Rudin, Smoke, and 
On the Eve have suffered more from the 
passage of time. Rudin is a pathetic pic- 
ture of the type that Turgenev was so fond 
of depicting, the génie sans porte-feuille, a 
latter-day Hamlet who can only unpack his 
heart with words, and with his eloquence 
persuade others to believe in him, and suc- 
ceed even in persuading himself to believe 
in himself, until the moment for action 
comes, when he breaks down. The subjects 
of Smoke and Spring Waters are almost 
identical; but, whereas Spring Waters is one 
of the most poetical of Turgenev’s achieve- 
ments, Smoke seems to-day the most banal, 
and almost to deserve Tolstoy’s criticism: 
*“In Smoke there is hardly any love of any- 
thing, and very little pity; there is only love 
of light and playful adultery; and therefore 
the poetry of that novel is repulsive.” On the 
Eve, which tells of a Bulgarian on the eve of 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 171 


the liberation of his country, suffers from 
being written at a time when real Russians 
were hard at work at that very task; and it 
was on this account that the novel found little 
favour in Russia, as the fiction paled beside 
the reality. 

It was followed by Turgenev’s master- 
piece, for which time can only heighten one’s 
admiration. Fathers and Sons is as beauti- 
fully constructed as a drama of Sophocles; 
the events move inevitably to a tragic close. 
There is not a touch of banality from beginning 
to end, and not an unnecessary word; the 
portraits of the old father and mother, the 
young Kirsanoyv, and all the minor char- 
acters are perfect; and amidst the trivial 
crowd, Bazarov stands out like Lucifer, the 
strongest—the only strong character—that 
Turgenev created, the first Nihilist—for if 
Turgenev was not the first to invent the word, 
he was the first to apply it in this sense. 

Bazarov is the incarnation of the Lucifer 
type that recurs again and again in Russian 
history and fiction, in sharp contrast to the 
meek humble type of Ivan Durak. Ler- 
montov’s Pechorin was in some respects an 
anticipation of Bazarov; so were the many 


172 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


Russian rebels. He is the man who denies, 
to whom art is a silly toy, who detests abstrac- 
tions, knowledge, and the love of Nature; 
he believes in nothing; he bows to nothing; 
he can break, but he cannot bend; he does 
break, and that is the tragedy, but, breaking, 
he retains his invincible pride, and 


“not cowardly he puts off his helmet,” 


and he dies “ valiantly vanquished.” 

In the pages which describe his death Tur- 
genev reaches the high-water mark of his art, 
his moving quality, his power, his reserve. 
For manly pathos they rank among the 
greatest scenes in literature, stronger than the 
death of Colonel Newcome and the best of 
Thackeray. Among English novelists it is, 
perhaps, only Meredith who has struck such 
strong, piercing chords, nobler than anything 
in Daudet or Maupassant, more reserved than 
anything in Victor Hugo, and worthy of the 
great poets, of the tragic pathos of Goethe and 
Dante. The character of Bazarov, as has been 
said, created a sensation and endless con- 
troversy. The revolutionaries thought him a 
caricature and a libel, the reactionaries a 
scandalous glorification of the Devil; and im- 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 1738 


partial men such as Dostoyevsky, who knew 
the revolutionaries at first hand, thought the 
type unreal. It is possible that Bazarov was 
not like the Nihilists of the sixties; but in 
any case as a figure in fiction, whatever the 
fact may be, he lives and will continue to live. 

In Virgin Soil, Turgenev attempted to 
paint the underground revolutionary move- 
ment; here, in the opinion of all Russian 
judges, he failed. The revolutionaries con- 
sidered their portraits here more unreal than 
that of Bazarov; the Conservatives were 
grossly caricatured; the hero Nezhdanov 
was a type of a past world, another Rudin, 
and not in the least like—so those who knew 
them tell us—the revolutionaries of the day. 
Solomin, the energetic character in the book, 
was considered as unreal as Nezhdanov. 
The wife of the reactionary Sipyagin is a 
pastiche of the female characters of that type 
in his other books; cleverly drawn, but a 
completely conventional book character. The 
redeeming feature in the book is Mariana, the 
heroine, one of Turgenev’s finest ideal women; 
and it is full, of course, of gems of descriptive 
writing. The book was a complete failure, 
and after this Turgenev went back to writing 


174 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


short stories. The result was a great dis- 
appointment to Turgenev, who had thought 
that, by writing a novel dealing with actual 
life, he would please and reconcile all parties. 
To this later epoch belong his matchless 
Poems in Prose, one of the latest melodies 
he sounded, a melody played on one string 
of the lyre, but whose sweetness contained the 
essence of all his music. 

Turgenev’s work has a historic as well as 
an artistic value. He painted the Russian 
gentry, and the type of gentry that was dis- 
appearing, as no one else has done. His 
landscape painting has been dwelt on; one 
ought, perhaps, to add that, beautiful as it 
is, it still belongs to the region of conventional 
landscape painting; his landscape is the 
orthodox Russian landscape, and is_ that 
of the age of Pushkin, in which no bird 
except a nightingale is mentioned, no flower 
except a rose. This convention was not 
really broken in prose until the advent of 
Gorky. 

Reviewing Turgenev’s work as a whole, 
any one who goes back to his books after a 
time, and after a course of more modern and 
rougher, stormier literature, will, I think, be 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 175 


surprised at its excellence and perhaps be 
inclined to heave a deep sigh of relief. Some 
of it will appear conventional; he will notice 
a faint atmosphere of rose-water; he will 
feel, if he has been reading the moderns, as a 
traveller feels who, after an exciting but 
painful journey, through dangerous ways and 
unpleasant surroundings, suddenly enters a 
cool garden, where fountains sob between 
dark cypresses, and swans float majestically 
on artificial lakes. There is an aroma of 
syringa in the air; the pleasaunce is artistic- 
ally laid out, and full of fragrant flowers. 
But he will not despise that garden for its 
elegance and its tranquil seclusion, for its 
trees cast large shadows; the nightingale 
sings in its thickets, the moon silvers the calm 
statues, and the sound of music on the waters 
goes to the heart. Turgenev reminds one of 
a certain kind of music, beautiful in form, not 
too passionate and yet full of emotion, Schu- 
mann’s music, for instance; if Pushkin is the 
Mozart of Russian literature, Turgenev is the 
Schumann; not amongst the very greatest, 
but still a poet, full of inspired lyrical feeling; 
and a great, a classic artist, the prose Virgil 
of Russian literature. 


176 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


What Turgenev did for the country gentry, 
GONCHAROV (1812-91) did for the St. 
Petersburg gentry. The greater part of his 
work deals with the forties. Goncharov, a 
noble (dvoryanin) by education, and according 
to his own account by descent, though accor- 
ding to another account he was of merchant 
extraction, entered the Government service, 
and then went round the world in a frigate, 
a journey which he described in letters. Of 
his three novels, The Everyday Story, Oblomov, 
and The Landslip, Oblomov is the most 
famous: in it he created a type which became 
immortal; and Oblomov has passed into the 
Russian language just as Tartuffe has passed 
into the French language, or Pecksniff into 
the English language. A chapter of the book 
appeared in 1849, and the whole novel in 
1859. 

Oblomov is the incarnation of what in 
Russia is called Halatnost, which means the 
propensity to live in dressing-gown and 
slippers. It is told of Krylov, who was an 
Oblomov of real life, and who spent most of his 
time lying on a sofa, that one day somebody 
pointed out to him that the nail on which 
a picture was hanging just over the. sofa 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM Wee 


on which he was lying, was loose, and that the 
picture would probably fall on his head. “No,” 
said Krylov, not getting up, “the picture will 
fall just beyond the sofa. I know the angle.” 
The apathy of Oblomoy, although to the out- 
ward eye it resembles this mere physical inert- 
ness, is subtly different. Krylov’s apathy was 
the laziness of a man whose brain brought 
forth concrete fruits; and who feels neither 
the inclination nor the need of any other 
exercise, either physical or intellectual. Ob- 
lomov’s apathy is that of a brain seething 
with the burning desires of a vie intime, 
which all comes to nothing owing to a kind 
of spiritual paralysis, ‘‘ une infirmité morale.” 
It is true he finds it difficult to put on 
his socks, still more to get up, when he 
is awake, impossible to change his rooms 
although the ceiling is falling to bits, and 
impossible not to lie on the sofa most of the 
day; but the reason of this obstinate inertia 
is not mere physical disinclination, it is the 
result of a mixture of seething and simmering 
aspirations, indefinite disillusions and appre- 
hensions, that elude the grasp of the will. 
Oblomoy is really the victim of a dream, of 


an aspiration, of an ideal as bright and mobile 
M 


178 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


as a will-o’-the-wisp, as elusive as thistle- 
down, which refuses to materialize. 

The tragedy of the book lies in the effort 
he makes to rise from his slough of apathy, 
or rather the effort his friends encourage him 
to make. Oblomov’s heart is made of pure 
gold; his soul is of transparent crystal; there 
is not a base flaw in the paste of his composi- 
tion; yet his will is sapped, not by words, 
words, words, but by the inability to formu- 
late the shadows of his inner life. His friend 
is an energetic German-Russian. He intro- 
duces Oblomov to a charming girl, and together 
they conspire to drag him from his apathy. 
The girl, Olga, at first succeeds; she falls in 
love with him, and he with her; he wants to 
marry her, but he cannot take the necessary 
step of arranging his affairs in a manner 
which would make that marriage possible; and 
gradually he falls back into a new stage of 
apathy worse than the first; she realizes the 
hopelessness of the situation, and they agree 
to separate. She marries the energetic friend, 
and Oblomov sinks into the comforts of a 
purely negative life of complete inaction and 
seclusion, watched over by a devoted house- 
keeper, whom he ultimately marries. 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 179 


The extraordinary subtlety of the psycho- 
logy of this study lies, as well as in other 
things, in the way in which we feel that Olga 
is not really happy with her excellent husband ; 
he is the man whom she respects ; but Oblomov 
is the man whom she loves, till the end; and 
she would give worlds to respect him too if he 
would only give her the chance. Oblomov 
often defends his stagnation, while realizing 
only too well what a misfortune it is; and 
we sometimes feel that he is not altogether 
wrong. The chapter that tells of his dream 
in which his past life and childhood arise 
before him in a haze of serene laziness is 
one of the masterpieces of Russian prose. 
The book is terribly real, and almost intoler- 
ably sad. 

Goncharov’s third and last novel deals 
with the life of a landed proprietor on the 
Volga, and its main idea is the contrast 
between the old generation before the reforms 
and the new generation of Alexander II’s 
day—a paler Fathers and Sons. 

To go back to criticism, the name of 
Bakunin, the apostle of destruction and the 
incarnation of Russian Nihilism, belongs to 
history; that of GricorreEv must be men- 


180 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


tioned as founding a school of thought which 
preached the union of arts with the national 
soil; he exercised a strong influence over 
Dostoyevsky. Katxov, whose influence was 
at one time immense, originally belonged 
to the circle of Herzen and Bakunin; he 
became a professor of philosophy, but was 
driven from his chair in the reaction of ’48, 
and, being banished from erudition, he took up 
a journalistic career and became the Editor 
of the Moscow News. He was a Slavophile, 
and when the rising in Poland broke out, 
he headed the great wave of nationalist 
feeling which passed over the country at that 
time; he doubled the number of his sub- 
seribers, and dealt a death-blow to Herzen’s 
Bell. After 1866, he headed reactionary 
journalism and became a Nationalist of the 
narrowest kind; but he was of a higher 
calibre than the Nationalists of later days. 
Slavophile critics of another kind were Stra- 
KHOvV and DaniLEevsxy, like Dostoyevsky, 
disciples of Grigoriev, who preached the last 
word of Slavophilism and were opposed to all 
foreign innovations. 

On the Radical side. the leaders were 
CHERNYSHEVSKY, DOBROLYUBOV and PISAREV. 


\ 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 181 


Chernyshevsky, who translated John Stuart 
Mill, and published a treatise on the esthetic 
relations of art and reality, served a sentence 
of seven years’ hard labour and of twenty 
years’ exile. His criticism—socialist propa- 
ganda, and an attack on all metaphysics— 
does not belong to literature, but his novel 
Shto dielat—‘‘ What is to be done? ”—had 
an immense influence on his generation. It 
deals with Nihilism. Dobrolyubov, who died 
when he was twenty-four, belonged to the 
same realistic school. His main theory was 
that Russian literature is dominated by 
Oblomov; that Chatsky, Pechorin, and Rudin 
are all Oblomovs. Both Pisarev and Do- 
brolyubov followed Chernyshevsky in his 
realistic philosophy, in his rejection of meta- 
physics, in his theory that beauty is to be 
sought in life only, and that the sole duty of 
art is to help to illustrate life. Pisarev recog- 
nized that Turgenev’s Bazarov was a picture 
of himself, and he was pleased with the portrait. 
Both Pisarev and Dobrolyubov died young. 
VLADIMIR SOLOVIEV (1853-1900), critic as 
well as poet, moral philosopher, and theo- 
logian, is one of the most interesting figures in 
Russian literature. What is most remarkable 


182 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


about him, and what makes him stand out, a 
radiant exception in Russian criticism, is his 
absolute independence. He belonged to no 
camp; he was a slave to no party cry; utterly 
unselfish, his sole aim was to seek after the 
truth for the sake of truth, and to proclaim 
it. In an age of positivism, he was a be- 
lieving Christian, and the dream of his life 
was a union of the Eastern and Western 
Churches. He deals with this idea in a book 
which he wrote in French and published in 
Paris: L’Eglise Russe et ? Eiglise Universelle. 
He admired the older Slavophiles, but he 
severely attacked the Nationalists, such as 
Katkov. His range of subjects was great, 
and his style was brilliant; like many great 
thinkers, he was far ahead of his time, and 
in his criticism of the Intelligentsia anticipated 
some tendencies, which have become visible 
since the revolution of 1905. He reminds one 
at times of Mr. A. J. Balfour, and even of 
Mr. G. K. Chesterton, with whose “‘ ortho- 
doxy ’”? he would have much sympathy; and 
he deals with questions such as Woman’s 
Suffrage in a way which exactly fits the present 
day. He never became a Catholic, holding 
that the Eastern Church gua Church had 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 183 


never been cut off from the West, and that 
only one definite schism had been condemned ; 
but he believed in the necessity of a uni- 
versal Church. He was the first intellectual 
Russian to point out to a generation which 
took atheism as a matter of course that they 
were possibly inferior instead of superior to 
religion. He believed in Russia; he had 
nothing against the Slavophile theory that 
Russia had a divine mission; only he wished 
to see that mission divinely performed. He 
believed in the East of Christ, and not in that 
of Xerxes. He died in 1900, before he had 
finished his Magnum Opus, a work on moral 
philosophy written on a religious basis. He 
preached self-effacement; pity towards one’s 
fellow men; and reverence towards the super- 
natural. His whole work is a defence of 
moral principles, written with the soul of 
a poet, the knowledge of a scholar, and 
the brilliance of a dialectician. It is only 
lately that his books have gained the appre- 
ciation which they deserve; they are certainly 
more in harmony with the present genera- 
tion than with that of the sixties and the 
seventies. His Three Conversations has been 
translated into English. Vladimir Soloviey 


184 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


stands in a niche of his own, isolated from the 
crowd by his own originality, his brilliance, 
and his prematurity; he was intempestivus. 
To the same epoch belong four other impor- 
tant writers, each occupying a place apart 
from the current stream of literary or political 
influences: one because he was a satirist, 
one because he wrote for the stage, and the 
two others because one impartially, and the 
other bitterly, dared to criticize the Radicals. 
MIcHAEL SALTYKOV (1826-89), who wrote 
under the name of Shchedrin, holds a unique 
place in Russian literature, not only because 
he is a writer of genius, but because he is one 
of the world’s great satirists. Unlike Russian 
satirists before him, Krylov, Gogol, and 
Griboyedoy, good-humoured irony or sharp 
rapier thrusts of wit do not suffice him; he 
has in himself the saeva indignatio, and he 
expresses it with all the concentrated spite 
that he can muster, which is all the more 
deadly from being used with perfect control. 
His work is bulky, and fills eleven thick 
volumes; some of it is quite out of date and 
at the present day almost unintelligible; but 
all that deals with the fundamental essentials 
of the Russian character, and not with the 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 185 


passing episodes of the day, has the freshness 
of immortality. At the outset of his career, 
he was banished to Vyatka, where he remained 
from 1848—56, an exile, which gave him a rich 
store of priceless material. His experiences 
appeared in his Sketches of Provincial Life 
in 1886-7. 

He describes the good old times and the 
officials of the good old times, with diabolic 
malice and with an unequalled eye for the 
ironical, the comic, the topsy-turvy, and the 
true; and while he is as observant as Gogol, 
he is as bitter as Swift. He puts his char- 
acters on the stage and makes them relate 
their experiences; thus we hear how the 
collector of the dues manages to combine 
the maximum amount of robbery with the 
minimum amount of inconvenience. In his 
pictures of prison life, the prisoners tell 
their own stories, sometimes with unaffected 
frankness, sometimes with startling cynicism, 
and sometimes the story is obscured by 
a whole heap of lies. The prisoners are of 
different classes; one is an ex-official who 
states that he was a statistician who got into 
trouble over his figures; wishing to levy dues 
on a peasant’s property, he had demanded 


186 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


the number, not of their bee-hives, but of 
their bees, and wrote in his list: ‘ The 
peasant Sidorov possesses two horses, three 
cows, nine sheep, one calf, and thirty-nine 
thousand nine hundred and _ninety-seven 
bees.” Unfortunately he was betrayed by 
the police inspector. 

Saltykov’s satire deals entirely with the 
middle class, the high officials, the average 
official, and the minor public servants; and his 
best-known work, and one that has not aged 
any more than Swift has aged, is his History 
of a City according to the original documents. 

In this he tells of the city of Glupov, Fool- 
City, where the people were such fools that 
they were not content until they found some 
one to rule them who was stupider than they 
were themselves. The various phases Russia 
had gone through are touched off; the mania 
for regulations, the formalism, the official red- 
tape, the persecution of independent thought, 
and the oppression of original thinkers and 
writers; the ultimate ideal is that introduced 
by the last ruler of Glupov (the history lasts 
from 1731 to 1826), of turning the country into 
barracks and reducing every one and every- 
thing to one level—in which the régime of 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 187 


the period of Nicholas I is satirized; until in 
the final picture, as fine in its way as Pope’s 
close of the Dunciad, the stream rises, and 
refusing to be stopped by the dam, carries 
everything away. The style parodies that 
of the ancient chroniclers; and its chief 
intent lies not in the satirizing of any particular 
events or person, but in the shafts of light, 
sometimes bitter, and sometimes inexpressibly 
droll, it throws on the Russian system of 
administration and on the Russian character. 

In his Pompaduri, Saltykov dissects and 
vivisects the higher official,—the big-wig,— 
and in his sketches from the ‘‘ Domain of 
Moderation and Accuracy,” he writes, in 
little, the epic of the minor public servant— 
the man who is never heard of, who is included 
in the term of “the rest,’ but who, never- 
theless, is a cogwheel in the machinery, without 
which the big-wigs cannot act or execute. 
No more supreme piece of art than this piece 
of satire exists. The typical minor official 
is drawn in all the variations of his miserable 
and pitiable species, and in all the phases 
of his ignoble and sometimes tragical career, 
with a pen dipped in scorn and stinging 
malice, not unblent with a grave pity, which 


188 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


always exists in the work of the greatest 
satirists—‘‘ Peace to all such, but there was 
one...” for instance—and wielded with 
terrible certainty of touch. This epic of the 
Molchalins of life—the typical officials who 
cease to be men—was the story of a great 
part of the Russian population; and in its 
essence, a great deal of it remains true to-day, 
while all of it remains artistically enjoyable. 
Saltykov continued to write during the 
whole of his long life. His field of satire 
ranges from the days before serfdom to 
the epoch of the reforms, extends to the 
days of the Russo-Turkish War, and passes 
the frontier into the West. It is impossible 
here even to name all his works; but there 
is one, written in the decline of his life, which 
has a solid historical as well as a rich and 
varied artistic interest. This is his Poshen- 
khonskaya Starina; it is practically the 
history of his childhood, his upbringing, and 
the state of affairs which existed at that 
time, the life lived by his parents and 
their neighbours, the landed proprietors and 
their serfs. With amazing impartiality, with- 
out exaggeration, and yet with evidences 
of deep feeling and passionate indignation, 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 189 


all the more striking from being both rare and 
expressed with reserve, he paints on a large 
and crowded canvas the life of the masters 
and their serfs. A long gallery of men and 
women is opened to one; tragedy, comedy, 
farce, all are here—in fact, life—life as it was 
then in a remote corner of the country. Here 
Saltykov’s spite and malice give way to higher 
strokes of tragic irony and pity; and the 
work has dignity as well as power. In the 
bulk of Saltykov’s early work there is much 
dross, much venom, and much ephemeral 
tinsel that has faded; the stuff of this book is 
stern and enduring; its subject-matter would 
not lose a particle of interest in translation. 
The Russians have been ungrateful towards 
Saltykov, and have been inclined to neglect 
his work, the lasting element of which is one 
of the most original, precious, and remarkable 
possessions of Russian literature. 

The complement of Saltykov is Lesxov (or, 
as he originally called himself, Stebnitsky). 
The character of his work, its reception by 
the reading public on the one hand, and by 
the professional critics on the other, is one 
of the most striking object-lessons in the 
history of Russian literature and Russian 


190 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


literary criticism. Leskov has been long 
ago recognized by educated Russia as a writer 
of the first rank; what is best in his work, 
which is bulky and unequal, has the unmistak- 
able hall-mark of the classics; he is with 
Gogol and Saltykov, and the novelists of the 
first rank. Educated Russia is fully aware 
of this. Nobody disputes Leskov his place, 
nor denies him his supreme artistic talent, 
his humour, his vividness, his colour, his 
satire, the depth of his feeling, the richness 
of his invention. In spite of this, there is no 
Russian writer who has so acutely suffered 
from the didactic and partisan quality of 
Russian criticism. 

His literary career began in 1860. Like 
Saltykov, he paints the period of transition 
that followed the epoch of the great Reforms. 
In spite of this, as late as 1902, no critical 
biography, no serious work of criticism, had 
been devoted to his books. All Russia had 
read him, but literary criticism had ignored 
him. It is as if English literary criticism had 
ignored Dickens until 1900. 

The reason of this neglect is not far to 
seek. Saltykov was an independent thinker; 





THE EPOCH OF REFORM 191 


he belonged to no literary or political camp; 
he criticized the partisans of both camps 
with equal courage; and the partisans could 
not and did not forgive him. Like Saltykov, 
Leskov saw what was going on in Russia; 
with penetrating insight and observation 
he realized the evils of the old order; like 
Saltykov, he was filled with indignation, 
and perhaps to a greater degree than Saltykov, 
he was filled with pity. But, whereas Salty- 
kov’s work was purely destructive—an on- 
slaught of brooms in the Augean stables— 
Leskov begins where Saltykov ends. Like 
Saltykov and like Gogol before him, the old 
order inspires him with laughter, sometimes 
with bitter laughter, at the absurdities of the 
old régime and its results ; but he does not con- 
fine himself to destructive irony and sapping 
satire. With Pisemsxy, another writer of first- 
class talent, of the same epoch, Leskov was 
the first Russian novelist—Griboyedov had 
already anticipated such criticism in Gore ot 
Uma, in his delineation of Chatsky,—to have 
the courage to criticize the reformers, the 
men of the new epoch; and his criticism was 
not only negative but creative; he realized 


192 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


that everything must be “reformed alto- 
gether.”” He then asked himself whether the 
new men, who were engaged in the task of 
reform, were equal to their task. He came 
to the conclusion not only that they were 
inadequate, but that they were setting about 
the business the wrong way, and he had the 
courage to say so. He was the first Russian 
novelist to say he disbelieved in Liberals, 
although be believed in Liberalism; and this 
was a sentiment which no Liberal in Russia 
could admit then, and one which they can 
scarcely admit now. 

His criticism of the Liberals was creative, 
and not negative, in this: that, instead of 
confining himself to pointing out their weak- 
ness and the mistaken course they were taking, 
he did his best to point out the right path. 
Dostoyevsky was likewise subjected to the 
same ostracism. Turgenev suffered from it; 
but the genius of Dostoyevsky and the art 
of Turgenev overstepped the limits of all 
barriers and frontiers. Europe acclaimed 
them. Leskov’s criticism being more local, 
the ostracism, although powerless to prevent 
the popularity of his work in Russia, suc- 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 193 


ceeded for a time in keeping him from the 
notice of Western Europe. This barrier is now 
being broken down. One of Leskov’s master- 
pieces, The Sealed Angel, was lately translated 
into English; but he is one of the most difficult 
authors to translate because he is one of the 
most native. 

A far bitterer and more pessimistic note is 
heard in the work of Pisemsky. He attacks 
the new democracy mercilessly, and not 
from any predilection towards the old. His 
most important work, The Troubled Sea (1862), 
was a terrific onslaught on Radical Russia; 
and Pisemsky paid the same price for his 
pessimistic analysis as Leskov did for his 
impartiality, namely social ostracism. 

The work of Ostrovsky (1823-86) belongs 
to the history of the Stage, to which he brought 
slices of real life from the middle class; the 
townsmen, the minor public servants, mer- 
chants great and small, and rogues, a milieu 
which he had observed in his youth, his father 
having been an attorney toa Moscow merchant. 
Ostrovsky may be called the founder of 
modern Russian realistic comedy and drama. 
In spite of the epoch at which his plays were 

N 


194 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


written (the fifties and the sixties), there is 
not a trace of Scribisme, no tricks, no effective 
exits or curtains; he thus anticipated the 
form of the quite modern drama by about 
seventy years. His plays hold the stage now 
in Russia, and form part of the stock reper- 
tories every season. They give, moreover, just 
the same lifelike impression whether read or 
seen acted; and they are as interesting from 
a literary as they are from a historical or 
dramatic point of view, interesting because 
they are intensely national, and as Russian 
as beer is English. 

This brief summary of the epoch would be 
still more incomplete than it is without the 
mention of yet another novelist, GRIGOROVICH. 
Although on a lower level of art and creative 
power than Pisemsky and Leskov, he was 
the pioneer in Russian literature of peasant 
literature. He anticipated Turgenev’s S‘ports- 
man’s Sketches, and for the first time made 
Russian readers cry with sympathy over the 
annals of the peasant. Like Turgenev, he 
was a great landscape painter. In his 
*‘ Fishermen ” he paints the peasant and the 
artisan’s life, and in his “‘ Country Roads” 
he gives a picture of the good old times— 


THE EPOCH OF REFORM 195 


replete with rich humour, and in sharp con- 
trast to Saltykov’s sunless and trenchant 
etching of the same period. Humour, the 
pathos of the poor, landscape—these are his 
chief qualities. 


CHAPTER VI 
TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 


Wirn Toustoy and DosTovEvsKy, we 
come not only to the two great pillars of 
modern Russian literature which tower above 
all others like two colossal statues in the 
desert, but to two of the greatest figures in the 
literature of the world. Russia has not given 
the world a universal poet, a Shakespeare, 
a Dante, a Goethe, or a/Moliére; for Pushkin, 
consummate artist and inspired poet as he 
was, lacks that peculiar greatness which 
conquers all demarcations of frontier and 
difference of language, and produces work 
which becomes a part of the universal in- 
heritance of all nations; but Russia has given 
us two prose-writers whose work has done 
this very thing. And between them they sum 
up in themselves the whole of the Russian 
soul, and almost the whole of the Russian 


character; I say almost the whole of the 
196 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 197 


Russian character, because although between 
them they sum up all that is greatest, deepest, 
and all that is weakest in the Russian soul, 
there is perhaps one element of the Russian 
character, which, although they understood it 
well enough, their genius forbade them to 
possess. If you take as ingredients Peter the 
Great, Dostoyevsky’s Mwyshkin—the idiot, 
the pure fool who is wiser than the wise—and 
the hero of Gogol’s Revisor, Hlestyakov the har 
and wind-bag, you can, I think, out of these 
elements, reconstitute any Russian who has 
ever lived. That is to say, you will find that 
every single Russian is compounded either of 
one or more of these elements. 

For instance, mix Peter the Great with a 
sufficient dose of Hlestyakov, and you get 
Boris Godunov and Bakunin; leave the 
Peter the Great element unmixed, and you 
get Bazarov, and many of Gorky’s heroes; 
mix it slightly with Hlestyakov, and you get 
Lermontov; let the Hlestyakov element pre- 
dominate, and you get Griboyedov’s Mol- 
chalin ; let the Mwyshkin element predominate, 
with a dose of Hlestyakov, and you get Father 
Gapon; let it predominate without the dose 
of Hlestyakov, and you get Oblomov; mix 


198 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


it with a dose of Peter the Great, you get 
Herzen, Chatsky; and so on. Mix all the 
elements equally, and you get Onegin, the 
average man. I do not mean that there are 
necessarily all these elements in every Russian, 
but that you will meet with no Russian in 
whom there is not to be found either one or 
more than one of them. 

Now, in Tolstoy, the Peter the Great element 
dominates, with a dose of Mwyshkin, and a 
vast but unsuccessful aspiration towards the 
complete characteristics of Mwyshkin; while 
in Dostoyevsky the Mwyshkin predominates, 
blent with a fiery streak of Peter the Great; 
but in neither of them is there a touch of 
Hlestyakov. In Russia, it constantly happens 
that a man in any class, be he a soldier, sailor, 
tinker, tailor, rich man, poor man, plough-boy, 
or thief, will suddenly leave his profession and 
avocation and set out on the search for God 
and for truth. ‘These men are called Bogois- 
kateli, Seekers after God. The one fact that 
the whole world knows about Tolstoy is that, 
in the midst of his great and glorious artistic 
career, he suddenly abjured literature and art, 
denounced worldly possessions, and said that 
truth was to be found in working like a 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 199 


peasant, and thus created a sect of Tolstoyists. 
The world then blamed him for inconsistency 
because he went on writing, and lived as before, 
with his family and in hisown home. But in 
reality there was no inconsistency, because 
there was in reality no break. Tolstoy had 
been a Bogoiskatel, a seeker after truth and 
God all his life; it was only the manner of 
his search which had changed; but the quest 
itself remained unchanged; he was unable, 
owing to family ties, to push his premises to 
their logical conclusion until just before his 
death; but push them to their logical con- 
clusion he did at the last, and he died, as we 
know, on the road to a monastery. 

Tolstoy’s manner of search was extra- 
ordinary, extraordinary because he was pro- 
vided for it with the eyes of an eagle which 
enabled him to see through everything; and, 
as he took nothing for granted from the day 
he began his career until the day he died, he 
was always subjecting people, objects, ideas, to 
the searchlight of his vision, and testing them 
to see whether they were true or not; more- 
over, he was gifted with the power of describ- 
ing what he saw during this long journey 
through the world of fact and the world of 


200 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


ideas, whether it were the general or the 
particular, the mass or the detail, the vision, 
the panorama, the crowd, the portrait or the 
miniature, with the strong simplicity of a 
Homer, and the colour and reality of a 
Velasquez. This made him one of the world’s 
greatest writers, and the world’s greatest 
artist in narrative fiction. Another peculiarity 
of his search was that he pursued it with 
eagle eyes, but with blinkers. 

In 1877 Dostoyevsky wrote: “ In spite of 
his colossal artistic talent, Tolstoy is one of 
those Russian minds which only see that which 
is right before their eyes, and thus press to- 
wards that point. They have not the power 
of turning their necks to the right or to the 
left to see what lies on one side; to do this, 
they would have to turn with their whole 
bodies. If they do turn, they will quite 
probably maintain the exact opposite of what 
they have been hitherto professing; for they 
are rigidly honest.” It is this search carried 
on by eyes of unsurpassed penetration be- 
tween blinkers, by a man who every now and 
then did turn his whole body, which accounts 
for the many apparent changes and contra- 
dictions of Tolstoy’s career. 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 201 


Another source of contradiction was that 
by temperament the Lucifer element pre- 
dominated in him, and the ideal he was for 
ever seeking was the humility of Mwyshkin, 
the pure fool, an ideal which he could not 
reach, because he could not sufficiently humble 
himself. Thus when death overtook him, 
he was engaged on his last and his greatest 
voyage of discovery; and there is something 
solemn and great about his having met with 
death at a small railway station. 

Tolstoy’s works are a long record of this 
search, and of the memories and experiences 
which he gathered on the way. There is not a 
detail, not a phase of feeling, not a shade or 
mood in his spiritual life that he has not told 
us of in his works. In his Childhood, Boyhood 
and Youth, he recreates his own childhood, 
boyhood and youth, not always exactly as it 
happened in reality; there is Dichtung as well 
as Wahrheit; but the Dichtung is as true as 
the Wahrheit, because his aim was to recreate 
the impressions he had received from his early 
surroundings. Moreover, the searchlight of 
his eyes even then fell mercilessly upon every- 
thing that was unreal, sham and conventional. 

As soon as he had finished with his youth, 


202 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


he turned to the life of a grown-up man in 
The Morning of a Landowner, and told how 
he tried to live a landowner’s life, and 
how nothing but dissatisfaction came of it. 
He escapes to the Caucasus, and seeks re- 
generation, and the result of the search here 
is a masterpiece, The Cossacks. He goes back 
to the world, and takes part in the Crimean 
war; he describes what he saw in a battery; 
his eagle eye lays bare the splendeurs et 
miséres of war more truthfully perhaps than 
a writer on war has ever done, but less sym- 
pathetically than Alfred de Vigny—the differ- 
ence being that Alfred de Vigny is innately 
modest, and that Tolstoy, as he wrote himself, 
at the beginning of the war, “had no 
modesty.” 

After the Crimean war, he plunges again 
into the world and travels abroad; and on his 
return to Russia, he settles down at Yasnaya 
Polyana and marries. The hero of his novel - 
Domestic Happiness appears to have found his 
heart’s desire in marriage and country life. 
It was then that he wrote War and Peace, 
which he began to publish in 1865. He always 
had the idea of writing a story on the Decem- 
brist movement, and War and Peace was 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 203 


perhaps the preface to that unwritten work, 
for it ends when that movement was beginning. 
In War and Peace, he gave the world a modern 
prose epic, which did not suffer from the 
drawback that spoils most historical novels, 
namely, that of being obviously false, because 
it was founded on his own recollection of his 
parents’ memories. He gives us what we feel 
to be the very truth; for the first time in an 
historical novel, instead of saying “ this is 
very likely true,”’ or “* what a wonderful work 
of artistic reconstruction,’’ we feel that we 
were ourselves there; that we knew those 
people; that they are a part of our very own 
past. He paints a whole generation of people; 
and in Pierre Bezukhov, the new landmarks 
of his own search are described. Among 
many other episodes, there is nowhere in 
literature such a true and charming picture 
of family life as that of the Rostovs, and no- 
where a more vital and charming personality 
than Natasha; a creation as living as Push- 
kin’s Tatiana, and alive with a reality even 
more convincing than Turgenev’s pictures 
of women, since she is alive with a different 
kind of life; the difference being that while 
you have read in Turgenev’s books about 


204 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


noble and exquisite women, you are not 
sure whether you have not known Natasha 
yourself and in your own life; you are not 
sure she does not belong to the borderland of 
your own past in which dreams and reality 
are mingled. War and Peace eclipses all 
other historical novels; it has all Stendhal’s 
reality, and all Zola’s power of dealing with 
crowds and masses. ‘Take, for instance, a 
masterpiece such as Flaubert’s Salammbé ; 
it may and very likely does take away your 
breath by the splendour of its language, its 
colour, and its art, but you never feel that, 
even in a dream, you had taken part in the 
life which is painted there. The only bit of 
unreality in War and Peace is the figure of 
Napoleon, to whom Tolstoy was deliberately 
unfair. Another impression which Tolstoy 
gives us in War and Peace is that man is in 
reality always the same, and that changes 
of manners are not more important than 
changes in fashions of clothes. That is why 
it is not extravagant to mention Salammbé 
in this connection. One feels that, if Tolstoy 
had written a novel about ancient Rome, we 
should have known a score of patricians, 
senators, scribblers, clients, parasites, matrons, — 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 205 


courtesans, better even than we know Cicero 
from his letters; we should not only feel that 
we know Cicero, but that we had actually 
known him. This very task—namely, that of 
reconstituting a page out of Pagan history— 
was later to be attempted by Merezhkovsky; 
but brilliant as his work is, he only at times 
and by flashes attains to Tolstoy’s power of 
convincing. . 
Anna Karenina appeared in 1875-76. And 
here Tolstoy, with the touch of a Velasquez and 
upon a huge canvas, paints the contemporary 
life of the upper classes in St. Petersburg and 
in the country. Levin, the hero, is himself. 
Here, again, the truth to nature and the reality 
is so intense and vivid that a reader unac- 
quainted with Russia will] in reading the book 
probably not think of Russia at all, but will 
imagine the story has taken place in his own 
country, whatever that may be. He shows 
you everything from the inside, as well as 
from the outside. You feel, in the picture of 
the races, what Anna is feeling in looking on, 
and what Vronsky is feeling in riding. And 
with what reality, what incomparable skill 
the gradual dawn of Anna’s love for Vronsky 
is described ; how painfully real is her pompous 


206 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


and excellent husband ; and how every incident 
in her love affair, her visit to her child, her 
appearance at the opera, when, after having 
left her husband, she defies the world, her 
gradual growing irritability, down to the final 
catastrophe, bears on it the stamp of some- 
thing which must have happened just in that 
very way and no other. 

But, as far as Tolstoy’s own development 
is concerned, Levin is the most interesting 
figure in the book. This character is another 
landmark in Tolstoy’s search after truth; he 
is constantly putting accepted ideas to the 
test; he is haunted by the fear of sudden 
death, not the physical fear of death in 
itself, but the fear that in the face of death 
the whole of life may be meaningless ; a peasant 
opens a new door for him and furnishes him 
with a solution to the problem—to live for 
one’s soul : life no longer seems meaningless. 

Thus Levin marks the stage in Tolstoy’s — 
evolution of his abandoning materialism and 
of seeking for the truth in the Church. But 
the Church does not satisfy him. He rejects 
its dogmas and its ritual; he turns to the 
Gospel, but far from accepting it, he revises it. 
He comes to the conclusion that Christianity 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 207 


as it has been taught is mere madness, and 
that the Church is a superfluous anachronism. 
Thus another change comes about, which is 
generally regarded as the change cutting 
Tolstoy’s life in half; in reality it is only 
a fresh right-about-turn of a man who is 
searching for truth in blinkers. In _ his 
Confession, he says: “ I grew to hate myself; 
and now all has become clear.”” He came to 
believe that property was the source of all 
evil; he desired literally to give up all he had. 
This he was not able to do. It was not that 
he shrank from the’ sacrifice at the last; but 
that circumstances and family ties were too 
strong for him. But his final flight from home 
in the last days of his life shows that the 
desire had never left him. 

Art was also subjected to his new standards 
and found wanting, both in his own work and 
in that of others. Shakespeare and Beet- 
hoven were summarily disposed of; his own 
masterpieces he pronounced to be worthless. 
This more than anything shows the pride of 
the man. He could admire no one, not even 
himself. He scorned the gifts which were 
given him, and the greatest gifts of the 
greatest men. But this landmark of Tolstoy’s 


208 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


evolution, his turning his back on the Church, 
and on his work, is a landmark in Russian 
history as well as in Russian art. For far 
less than this Russian thinkers and writers 
of high position had been imprisoned and 
exiled. Nobody dared to touch Tolstoy. He 
fearlessly attacked all constituted authority, 
both spiritual and temporal, in an epoch of 
reaction, and such was his prestige that 
official Russia raised no finger. His authority 
was too great, and this is perhaps the first 
great victory of the liberty of individual 
thought over official tyranny in Russia. 
There had been martyrs in plenty before, but 
no conquerors. 

After Anna Karenina, Tolstoy, who gave 
up literature for a time, but for a time only, 
nevertheless continued to write ; at first he only 
wrote stories for children and theological and 
polemical pamphlets; but in 1886 he pub- 
lished the terribly powerful peasant drama: 
The Powers of Darkness. Water came the 
Kreutzer Sonata, the Death of Ivan Ilitch, and 
Resurrection. Were the hero Nehludov is a 
lifeless phantom of Tolstoy himself; the 
episodes and details have the reality of 
his early work, so has Maslova, the heroine; 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 209 


but in the squalor and misery of the prisons 
he shows no precious balms of humanity and 
love, as Dostoyevsky did; and the book has 
neither the sweep and epic swing of War and 
Peace, nor the satisfying completeness of 
Anna Karenina. Since his death, some post- 
humous works have been published, among 
them a novel, and a play : The Living Corpse. 
He died, as he had lived, still searching, and 
perhaps at the end he found the object of his 
quest. 

Tolstoy, even more than Pushkin, was 
rooted to the soil; all that is not of the soil— 
anything mystic or supernatural—was totally 
alientohim. He was the oak which could not 
bend; and being, as he was, the king of realistic 
fiction, an unsurpassed painter of pictures, 
portraits, men and things, a penetrating analyst 
of the human heart, a genius cast in a colossal 
mould, his work, both by its substance and 
its artistic power, exercised an influence be- 
yond his own country, affected all European 
nations, and gives him a place among the great 
creators of the world. Tolstoy was not a rebel 
but a heretic, a heretic not only to religion and 
the Church, but in philosophy, opinions, art, 


and even in food; but what the world will 
re) 


210 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


remember of him are not his heretical theories 
but his faithful practice, which is orthodox in 
its obedience to the highest canons, orthodox 
as Homer and Shakespeare are orthodox, and 
like theirs, one of the greatest earthly examples 
of the normal and the sane. 

To say that DostoYEvsxy is the antithesis 
to Tolstoy, and the second great pillar of 
Russian prose literature, will surprise nobody 
now. Had one been writing ten years ago, 
the expression of such an opinion would have 
met with an incredulous smile amongst the 
majority of English readers of Russian litera- 
ture, for Dostoyevsky was practically un- 
known save for his Crime and Punishment, 
and to have compared him with Turgenev 
would have seemed sacrilegious. Now when 
Dostoyevsky is one of the shibboleths of our 
intelligentsia, one can boldly say, without fear 
of being misunderstood, that, as a creator 
and a force in literature, Dostoyevsky is in 
another plane than that of Turgenev, and as 
far greater than him as Leonardo da Vinci 
is greater than Vandyke, or as Wagner is 
greater than Gounod, while some Russians 
consider him even infinitely greater than 
Tolstoy. Let us say he is his equal and 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 211 


complement. He is in any case, in almost 
every respect, his antithesis. Tolstoy was the 
incarnation of health, and is above all things 
and pre-eminently the painter of the sane and 
the earthly. Dostoyevsky was an epileptic, the 
painter of the abnormal, of criminals, madmen, 
degenerates, mystics. Tolstoy led an even, 
uneventful life, spending the greater part of 
it in his own country house, in the midst of 
a large family. Dostoyevsky was condemned 
to death, served a sentence of four years’ 
hard labour in a convict settlement in 
Siberia, and besides this spent six years in 
exile; when he returned and started a news- 
paper, it was prohibited by the Censorship; 
a second newspaper which he started came to 
grief; he underwent financial ruin; his first 
wife, his brother, and his best friend died; 
he was driven abroad by debt, harassed by the 
authorities on the one hand, and attacked by 
the liberals on the other; abused and misunder- 
stood, almost starving and never well, work- 
ing under overwhelming difficulties, always 
pressed for time, and ill requited for his 
toil. That was Dostoyevsky’s life. 

Tolstoy was a heretic; at first a materialist, 
and then a seeker after a religion of his own; 


212 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


Dostoyevsky was a practising believer, a 
vehement apostle of orthodoxy, and died 
fortified by the Sacraments of the Church. 
Tolstoy with his broad unreligious opinions 
was narrow-minded. Dostoyevsky with his 
definite religious opinions was the most 
broad-minded man who ever lived. Tolstoy 
hated the supernatural, and was alien to all 
mysticism. Dostoyevsky seems to get nearer 
to the unknown, to what lies beyond the 
flesh, than any other writer. In Tolstoy, the 
Peter the Great element of the Russian 
character predominated ; in Dostoyevsky that 
of Mwyshkin, the pure fool. Tolstoy could 
never submit and humble himself. Submission 
and humility and resignation are the keynotes 
and mainsprings of Dostoyevsky. Tolstoy 
despised art, and paid no homage to any of 
the great names of literature; and this was 
not only after the so-called change. As early 
as 1862, he said that Pushkin and Beethoven 
could not please because of their absolute 
beauty. Dostoyevsky was catholic and cos- 
mopolitan, and admired the literature of 
foreign countries—Racine as well as Shake- 
speare, Corneille as well as Schiller. The 
essence of Tolstoy is a magnificent intolerance. 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 213 


The essence of Dostoyevsky is sweet reason- 
ableness. Tolstoy dreamed of giving up all he 
. had to the poor, and of living like a peasant; 
Dostoyevsky had to share the hard labour 
of the lowest class of criminals. Tolstoy 
theorized on the distribution of food; but 
Dostoyevsky was fed like a beggar. Tolstoy 
wrote in affluence and at leisure, and re-wrote 
his books; Dostoyevsky worked like a literary 
hack for his daily bread, ever pressed for time 
and ever in crying need of money. 

These contrasts are not made in disparage- 
ment of Tolstoy, but merely to point out the 
difference between the two men and between 
their circumstances. Tolstoy wrote about 
himself from the beginning of his career to the 
end; nearly all his work is autobiographical, 
and he almost always depicts himself in all 
his books. We know nothing of Dostoyevsky 
from his books. He was an altruist, and 
he loved others better than himself. 

Dostoyevsky’s first book, Poor Folk, pub- 
lished in 1846, is a descendant of Gogol’s 
story The Cloak, and bears the influence, to 
a slight extent, of Gogol. In this, the story 
of a minor public servant battling against 
want, and finding a ray of light in correspond- 


214 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


ing with a girl also in poor circumstances, but 
who ultimately marries a rich middle-aged 
man, we already get all Dostoyevsky’s peculiar 
sweetness; what Stevenson called his “ lovely 
goodness,” his almost intolerable pathos, his 
love of the disinherited and of the failures 
of life. His next book, Letters from a Dead 
House, has a far more universal interest. It 
is the record of his prison experiences, which 
is of priceless value, not only on account of 
its radiant moral beauty, its perpetual dis- 
covery of the soul of goodness in things evil, 
its human fraternity, its complete absence 
of egotism and pose, and its thrilling human 
interest, but also on account of the light it 
throws on the Russian character, the Russian 
poor, and the Russian peasant. 

In 1866 came Crime and Punishment, 
which brought Dostoyevsky fame. This book, 
Dostoyevsky’s Macbeth, is so well known in 
the French and English translations that it. 
hardly needs any comment. Dostoyevsky 
never wrote anything more -tremendous than 
the portrayal of the anguish that seethes in the 
soul of Raskolnikov, after he has killed the old 
woman, “‘mechanically forced,” as Professor 
Brickner says, ‘‘ into performing the act, as 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 215 


if he had gone too near machinery in motion, 
had been caught by a bit of his clothing and 
cut to pieces.”” And not only is one held 
spellbound by every shifting hope, fear, and 
doubt, and each new pang that Raskolnikov 
experiences, but the souls of all the subsidiary 
characters in the book are revealed to us just 
as clearly : the Marmeladov family, the honest 
Razumikhin, the police inspector, and the 
atmosphere of the submerged tenth in St. 
Petersburg—the steaming smell of the city 
in the summer. There is an episode when 
Raskolnikov kneels before Sonia, the prosti- 
tute, and says to her: “It is not before you 
I am kneeling, but before all the suffering of 
mankind.” That is what Dostoyevsky does 
himself in this and in all his books; but in 
none of them is the suffering of all mankind 
conjured up before us in more living colours, 
and in none of them is his act of homage in 
kneeling before it more impressive. 

This book was written before the words 
‘* psychological novel ”’ had been invented; 
but how all the psychological novels which 
were written years later by Bourget and 
others pale before this record written in blood 
and tears! Crime and Punishment was fol- 


216 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


lowed by The Idiot (1868). The idiot is 
Mwyshkin, who has been alluded to already, 
the wise fool, an epileptic, in whom irony 
and arrogance and egoism have been anni- 
hilated; and whose very simplicity causes him 
to pass unscathed through a den of evil, a 
world of liars, scoundrels, and thieves, none 
of whom can escape the influence of his 
radiant personality. He is the same with 
every one he meets, and with his unsuspicious 
sincerity he combines the intuition of utter 
goodness, so that he can see through people 
and read their minds. In this character, 
Dostoyevsky has put all his sweetness; it is 
not a portrait of himself, but it is a portrait 
of what he would have liked to be, and 
reflects all that is best in him. In contrast 
to Mwyshkin, Rogozhin, the merchant, is the 
incarnation of undisciplined passion, who 
ends by killing the thing he loves, Nastasia, 
also a creature of unbridled impulses,—because. 
he feels that he can never really and fully 
possess her. The catastrophe, the description 
of the night after Rogozhin has killed Nastasia, 
is like nothing else in literature; lifelike in 
detail and immense, in the way in which it 
makes you listen at the keyhole of the soul, 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 217 


immense with the immensity of a great revela- 
tion. The minor characters in the book are 
also all of them remarkable; one of them, 
the General’s wife, Madame Epanchin, has an 
indescribable and playful charm, 

The Idiot was followed by The Possessed, 
or Devils, printed in 1871-72, called thus after 
the Devils in the Gospel of St. Luke, that 
left the possessed man and went into the 
swine; the Devils in the book are the hangers- 
on of Nihilism between 1862 and 1869. The 
book anticipated the future, and in _ it 
Dostoyevsky created characters who were 
identically the same, and committed identi- 
cally the same crimes, as men who actually 
lived many years later in 1871, and later 
still. The whole book turns on the exploita- 
tion by an unscrupulous, ingenious, and iron- 
willed knave of the various weaknesses of a 
crowd of idealist dupes and disciples. One of 
them is a decadent, one of them is one of those 
idealists ‘*‘ whom any strong idea strikes all of 
a sudden and annihilates his will, sometimes for 
ever ”; one of them is a maniac whose single 
idea is the production of the Superman which 
he thinks will come, when it will be immaterial 
to a man whether he lives or dies, and when 


218 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


he will be prepared to kill himself not out of 
fear but in order to kill fear. That man will be 
God. Not the God-man, but the Man-God. 
The plan of the unscrupulous leader, Peter 
Verkhovensky, who was founded on Nechaev, a 
Nihilist of real life, is to create disorder, and 
amid the disorder to seize the authority; he 
imagines a central committee of which he 
pretends to be the representative, organizes 
a small local committee, and persuades his 
dupes that a network of similar small com- 
mittees exist all over Russia; his aim being 
to create them gradually, by persuading people 
in every plot of fresh ground that they exist 
everywhere else. 

Thus the idea of the book was to show that 
the strength of Nihilism lay, not in high 
dogmas and theories held by a large and well- 
organized society, but in the strength of the 
will of one or two men reacting on the weaker 
herd and exploiting the strength, the weak- 
ness, and the one-sidedness of its ideals, a 
herd which was necessarily weak owing to 
that very one-sidedness. In order to bind his 
disciples with a permanent bond, Verkhoven- 
sky exploits the zdée fixe of suicide and the 
superman, which is held by one of his dupes, 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 219 


to induce him to commit a crime before he 
kills himself, and thus make away with another 
member of the committee who is represented 
as being aspy. Once this is done, the whole 
committee will be jointly responsible, and 
bound to him by the ties of blood and fear. 
But Verkhovensky is not the hero of the book. 
The hero is Stavrogin, whom Verkhovensky 
regards as his trump card, because of the 
strength of his character, which leads him to 
commit the most outrageous extravagances, 
and at the same time to remain as cold as 
ice; but Verkhovensky’s whole design is shat- 
tered on Stavrogin’s character, all the murders 
already mentioned are committed, the whole 
scheme comes to nothing, the conspirators are 
discovered, and Peter escapes abroad. 

When Devils appeared in 1871, it was looked 
upon as a gross exaggeration, but real life in 
subsequent years was to produce characters 
and events of the same kind, which were more 
startling than Dostoyevsky’s fiction. The 
book is the least well-constructed of Dostoyey- 
sky’s; the narrative is disconnected, and the 
events, incidents, and characters so crowded 
together, that the general effect is confused ; 
on the other hand, it contains isolated scenes 


220 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


which Dostoyevsky never surpassed; and in 
its strength and in its limitations it is perhaps 
his most characteristic work. 

From 1873-80 Dostoyevsky went back to 
journalism, and wrote his Diary of a Writer, 
in which he commented on current events. 
In 1880, he united all conflicting and hostile 
parties and shades of public opinion, by the 
speech he made at the unveiling of Pushkin’s 
memorial, in one common bond of enthusiasm. 
At the end of the seventies, he returned 
to a work already begun, The Brothers 
Karamazov, which, although it remains the 
longest of his books, was never finished. It 
is the story of three brothers, Dimitri, Ivan, 
and Alyosha; their father is a cynical sen- 
sualist. The eldest brother is an undisci- 
plined, passionate character, who expiates his 
passions by suffering; the second brother is 
a materialist, the tragedy of whose inner life 
forms a greater part of the book; the third 
brother, Alyosha, is a lover of humanity, and 
a believer in God and man. He seeks a 
monastery, but his spiritual father sends him 
out into the world, to live and to suffer. He 
is to go through the furnace of the world and 
experience many trials; for the microbe of 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 221 


lust that is in his family is dormant in him 
also. The book was called the History of a 
Great Sinner, and the sinner was to be Alyosha. 
But Dostoyevsky died before this part of the 
subject is even approached. 

He died in January 1881; the crowds of 
men and women of all sorts and conditions of 
life that attended his funeral, and the ex- 
tent and the sincerity of the grief manifested, 
gave it an almost mythical greatness. The 
people gave him a funeral such as few kings 
or heroes have ever had. Without fear of 
controversy or contradiction one can now say 
that Dostoyevsky’s place in Russian literature 
is at the top, equal and in the opinion of some 
superior-to that of Tolstoy in greatness. He 
is also one of the greatest writers the world has 
ever produced, not because, like Tolstoy, he 
saw life steadily and saw it whole, and painted 
it with the supreme and easy art of a Velasquez; 
nor because, like Turgenev, he wove exquisite 
pictures into musical words. Dostoyevsky 
was not an artist; his work is shapeless; his 
books are like quarries where granite and 
dross, gold and ore are mingled. He paid no 
attention to style, and yet so strong and vital 
is his spoken word that when the Moscow Art 


222 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


Theatre put some scenes in The Brothers 
Karamazov and Devils on the stage, they 
found they could not alter one single syllable; 
and sometimes his words have a power beyond 
that of words, a power that only music has. 
There are pages where Dostoyevsky expresses 
the anguish of the soul in the same manner 
as Wagner expressed the delirium of dying 
Tristram. Ishould indeed put the matter the 
other way round, and say that in the last act 
of Tristram, Wagner is as great as Dostoyev- 
sky. But Dostoyevsky is great because of 
the divine message he gives, not didactically, 
not by sermons, but by the goodness that 
emanates, like a precious balm, from the 
characters he creates; because more than any 
other books in the world his books reflect not 
only the teaching and the charity, but the 
accent and the divine aura of love that is in 
the Gospels. 

‘*T am not talking to you now through the 
medium of custom, conventionalities, or even 
of mortal flesh; it is my spirit that addresses 
your spirit, just as if both had passed through 
the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal 
—as we are!” These words, spoken by 
Charlotte Brénte’s Jane Eyre, express what 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 223 


Dostoyevsky’s books do. His spirit addresses 
our spirit. “Be no man’s judge; humble 
love is a terrible power which effects more 
than violence. Only active love can bring 
out faith. Love men, and do not be afraid 
of their sins; love man in his sin; love all 
the creatures of God, and pray God to make 
you cheerful. Be cheerful as children and 
as the birds.” This was Father Zosima’s 
advice to Alyosha. And that is the gist of 
Dostoyevsky’s message to mankind. “ Life,” 
Father Zosima also says to Alyosha, “ will 
bring you many misfortunes, but you will be 
happy on account of them, and you will bless 
life and cause others to bless it.” Here we 
have the whole secret of Dostoyevsky’s great- 
ness. He blessed life, and he caused others 
to bless it. 

It is objected that his characters are 
abnormal; that he deals with the diseased, 
with epileptics, neurasthenics, criminals, sensu- 
alists, madmen; but it is just this very fact 
which gives so much strength and value to 
the blessing he gave to life; it is owing to 
this fact that he causes others to bless life; 
because he was cast in the nethermost circle 
of life’s inferno; he was thrown together with 


224 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


the refuse of humanity, with the worst of men 
and with the most unfortunate; he saw the 
human soul on the rack, and he saw the vilest 
diseases that afflict the human soul; he faced 
the evil without fear or blinkers; and there, 
in the inferno, in the dust and ashes, he 
recognized the print of divine footsteps and 
the fragrance of goodness; he cried from the 
abyss : ‘“‘ Hosanna to the Lord, for He is just!” 
and he blessed life. It is true that his char- 
acters are taken almost entirely from the 
Despised and Rejected, as one of his books 
was called, and often from the ranks of the 
abnormal; but when a great writer wishes to 
reveal the greatest adventures and the deepest 
experiences which the soul of man can undergo, 
it is in vain for him to take the normal type; 
it has no adventures. The adventures of the 
soul of Fortinbras would be of no help to man- 
kind; but the adventures of Hamlet are of 
help to mankind, and the adventures of Don 
Quixote; and neither Don Quixote nor Hamlet 
are normal types. 

Dostoyevsky wrote the tragedy of life and 
of the soul, and to do this he chose circum- 
stances as terrific as those which unhinged 
the reason of King Lear, shook that of Hamlet, 


TOLSTOY AND DOSTOYEVSKY 225 


and made (idipus blind himself. His books 
resemble Greek tragedies by the magnitude 
of the spiritual adventures they set forth; 
they are unlike Greek Tragedies in the 
Christian charity and the faith and the hope 
which goes out of them; they inspire the 
reader with courage, never with despair, 
although Dostoyevsky, face to face with the 
last extremities of evil, never seeks to hide it 
or to shun it, but merely to search for the 
soul of goodness in it. He did not search in 
vain, and just as, when he was on his way to 
Siberia, a conversation he had with a fellow- 
prisoner inspired that fellow-prisoner with the 
feeling that he could go on living and even 
face penal servitude, so do Dostoyevsky’s 
books come to mankind as a message of hope 
from a radiant country. That is what con- 
stitutes his peculiar greatness. 


CHAPTER VII 
THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY 


Tue fifties, the sixties, and the seventies 
were, all over Europe, the epoch of Parnassian 
poetry. In England, Tennyson was pouring 
out his ‘“‘ fervent and faultless melodies,” 
Matthew Arnold was playing his plaintive 
harp, and the Pre-Raphaelites were weaving 
their tapestried dreams; in France, Gautier 
was carving his cameos, Banville’s Harle- 
quins and Columbines were dancing on a 
Watteau-like stage in the silver twilight of 
Corot, Baudelaire was at work on his sombre 
bronze, Sully-Prudhomme twanged his ivory 
lyre, and Leconte de Lisle was issuing his 
golden coinage. It was, in poetry, the epoch 
of art for art’s sake. 

Russian poetry did not escape the universal 
tendency; but in Russia everything was con- 
spiring to put poetry, and especially that kind 
of poetry, in the shade. In the first place, 

226 


THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY — 227 


events of great magnitude were happening— 
the wide reforms, the emancipation of the 
serfs, the growth of Nihilism, which was the 
product of the disillusion at the result of the 
reforms : in the second place, criticism under 
the influence of Chernyshevsky, Pisarev, and 
Dobrolyubov was entirely realistic and posi- 
tivist, preaching not art for life’s sake only, 
but the absolute futility of poetry; and, in 
the third place, work of the supremest kind 
was being done in narrative fiction; in the 
fourth place, no prophet-poet was forth- 
coming whose genius was great enough to 
voice national aspirations. All this tended 
to put poetry in the shade, especially as such 
poets as did exist were, with one notable 
exception, Parnassians, whose talent dwelt 
aloof from the turbid stream of life, and who 
sought to express the adventures of their 
souls, which were emotional and artistic, either 
in dreamy music or in exquisite shapes and 
colours. This neglect of verse lasted right 
up until the end of the seventies. When, how- 
ever, in the eighties, the wave of political crisis 
reached its climax and, after the assassina- 
tion of Alexander II, rolled back into a sea 
of stagnant reaction, the poets, who had been 


228 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


hitherto neglected, and quietly singing all the 
while, were discovered once more, and the 
shares in poetry continued to rise as time 
went on; thus the poets of the sixties reaped 
their due meed of appreciation. 

A proof of how widespread and deep this 
neglect was is that TyutrcHEv, whose work 
attracted no attention whatever until 1854, 
and met with no wide appreciation until a 
great deal later, was four years younger than 
Pushkin, and a man of thirty when Goethe 
died. He went on living until 1873, and can 
be called the first of the Parnassians. Politi- 
cally, he was a Slavophile, and sang the 
‘“‘ resignation ” and “ long-suffering ”’ of the 
Russian people, which he preferred to the 
stiff-neckedness of the West. But the value 
of his work lies less in his Slavophile aspira- 
tions than in its depth of thought and lyrical 
feeling, in the contrast between the gloomy 
forebodings of his imagination and the sun- 
like images he gives of nature. His verse is 
like a spring day, dark with ominous thunder- 
clouds, out of which a rainbow and a shaft 
of sunlight fall on a dewy orchard and light 
it with a silvery smile. His verse is, on the 
one hand, full of foreboding and terror at the 


THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY — 229 


fate of man and the shadow of nothingness, 
and, on the other hand, it twitters like a bird 
over the freshness and sunshine of spring. 
He sings the spring again and again, and no 
Russian poet has ever sung the glory, the 
mystery, the wonder, and the terror of night 
as he has done; his whole work is com- 
pounded of glowing pictures of nature and a 
world of longing and of unutterable dreams. 

The dreamy dominion of the Parnassian 
age, on whose threshold Tyutchev stood, was 
to be disturbed by the notes of a harsher and 
stronger music. 

NEKRASOV (1821-77), Russia’s “ sternest 
painter,” and certainly one of her best, drew 
his inspiration direct from life, and sang the 
sufferings, the joys, and the life of the people. 
He is a Russian Crabbe; nature and man are 
his subjects, but nature as the friend and foe 
of man, as a factor, the most important factor 
in man’s life, and not as an ideal storehouse 
from which a Shelley can draw forms more 
real than living man, nurslings of immortality, 
or a Wordsworth reap harvests of the inward 
eye. He called his muse the “ Muse of 
Vengeance and of Grief.” He is an uncom- 
promising realist, like Crabbe, and idealizes 


230 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


nothing in his pictures of the peasant’s life. 
Like Crabbe, he has a deep note of pathos, 
and a keen but not so minute an eye for 
landscape. 

On the other hand, he at times attains to 
imaginative sublimity in his descriptions, as, 
for instance, in his poem called The Red-nosed 
Frost, where King Frost approaches a peasant 
widow who is at work in the winter forest, 
and freezes her to death. As Daria is gra- 
dually freezing to death, the frost comes to her 
like a warrior; and his semblance and attri- 
butes are drawn in a series of splendid stanzas. 
He sings to her of his riches that no profusion 
can decrease, and of his kingdom of silver and 
diamonds and pearls : then, as she freezes, she 
dreams of a hot summer’s day, and of the rye 
harvest and of the familiar songs— 


‘** Away with the song she is soaring, 
She surrenders herself to its stream, 
In the world there is no such sweet singing 
As that which we hear in a dream.” 


His longest and most ambitious work was 
a kind of popular epic, Who is Happy in 
Russia? written in short lines which have 


THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY 231 


the popular ring and accent. Some peasants 
start on a pilgrimage to find out who is happy 
in Russia. They fly on a magic carpet, and 
interview representatives of the different 
classes of society, the pope, the landowner, 
the peasant woman, each new interview 
producing a whole series of stories, some- 
times idyllic and sometimes tragic, and all 
showing their genius as intimate pictures of 
various phases of Russian life. Here, again, 
the analogy with Crabbe suggests itself, for 
Nekrasov’s tales, taking into consideration the 
difference between the two countries, have a 
marked affinity, both in their subject matter, 
their variety, their stern realism, their pathos, 
their bitterness, and their observation of 
nature, with Crabbe’s stories in verse. 

Two of Nekrasov’s long poems tell the story 
in the form of reminiscence,—and here again 
the naturalness and appropriateness of the 
diction is perfect,—of the Russian women, 
Princess Volkonsky and Princess Trubetzkoy, 
who followed their husbands, condemned to 
penal servitude for taking part in the Decem- 
brist rising, to Siberia. Here, again, Nekrasov 
strikes a note of deep and poignant pathos, 


232 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


all the more poignant from thie absolute 
simplicity with which the tales are told. 
Nekrasov towers among the Parnassians of 
the time and has only one rival, whom we 
shall describe presently 

The Parnassians are represented by three 
poets, Markov (1821-97), Fer (1820-98), 
and PoLonsky (1820-98), all three of whom 
began to write about the same time, in 1840; 
none of these three poets was didactic, and 
all three remained aloof from political or 
social questions. 

Maikov is attracted by classical themes, by 
Italy and also by old ballads, but his strength 
lies in his plastic form, his colour, and his 
pictures of Russian landscape; he writes, for 
instance, an exquisite reminiscence of a day’s 
fishing when he was a boy. 

The quality of Fet’s muse, in contrast to 
Maikov’s concrete plasticity, is illusiveness; 
his lyrics express intangible dreams and im- 
pressions; delicate tints and shadows tremble 
and flit across his verse, which is soft as the 
orient of a pearl; and his fancy is as delicate as 
a thread of gossamer: he lives in the border- 
land between words and music, and catches 
the vague echoes of that limbo. 


THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY ~~ 23838 


“‘ The world in shadow slipped away 
And, like a silent dream took flight, 
Like Adam, I in Eden lay 
Alone, and face to face with night.” 


He sings about the southern night amidst 
the hay; or again about the dawn— 


** A whisper, a breath, a shiver, 
The trills of the nightingale, 
A silver light and a quiver 
And a sunlit trail. 
The glimmer of night and the shadows of 
night | 
In an endless race, 
Enchanted changes, flight after flight, 
On the loved one’s face. 
The blood of the roses tingling 
In the clouds, and a gleam in the grey, 
And tears and kisses commingling— 
The Dawn, the Dawn, the Day!” 


Polonsky’s verse, in contrast to Fet’s gentle 
epicurean temperament, his delicate half- 
tones and illusive whispers, is made of sterner 
stuff; and, in contrast to Maikov’s sculptural 
lines, it is pre-eminently musical, and reflects 
a fine and charming personality. His area 


234 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


of subjects is wide; he can write a child’s poem 
as transparent and simple as Hans Andersen 
—as in his conversation between the sun and 
the moon—or call up the “glory that was 
Greece,”’ as in the poem when his “ Aspasia ” 
listens to the crowds acclaiming Pericles, and 
waits in rapturous suspense for his return— 
an evocation that Browning would have 
envied for its life and Swinburne for its 
sound. 

But neither Maikov, Fet, nor Polonsky, 
exquisite as much of their writing is, produced 
anything of the calibre of Nekrasov, even in 
their own province; that is to say, they were 
none of them as great in the artistic field as 
he was in his didactic field. Compared with 
him, they are minor poets. There is one 
poet of this epoch who does rival Nekrasov 
in another field, and that is Count ALExIs 
Toutstoy (1817-75), who was also a Par- 
nassian and remained aloof from didactic 
literature; yet, under the pseudonym of 
Kuzma Prutkov, he wrote a satire, a collection 
of platitudes, that are household words in 
Russia; also a short history of Russia in 
consummately neat and witty satirical verse. 


THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY — 2385 


As well as his satires, he wrote an historical 
novel, Prince Serebryany, and more important 
still, a trilogy of plays, dealing with the most 
dramatic epoch of Russian history, that of 
Ivan the Terrible. The trilogy, written in 
verse, consists of the ‘‘ Death of Ivan the 
Terrible,” ‘The Tsar Feodor Ivanovitch” 
and “Tsar Boris.” They are all of them 
acting plays, form part of the current classical 
repertory, and are effective, impressive and 
arresting when played on the stage. 

But it is as a poet and as a lyrical poet that 
Alexis Tolstoy is most widely known. Ver- 
satile with a versatility that recalls Pushkin, 
he writes epical ballads on Russian, Northern, 
and even Scottish themes, and dramatic 
poems on Don Juan, St. John Damascene, 
and Mary Magdalene; and, besides these, a 
whole series of personal lyrics, which are full 
of charm, tenderness, music and _ colour, 
harmonious in form and transparent. No 
Russian poet since Pushkin has written such 
tender love lyrics, and nobody has sung the 
Russian spring, the Russian summer, and 
the Russian autumn with such tender 
lyricism. His poem on the early spring, 


236 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


when the fern is still tightly curled, the shep- 
herd’s note still but half heard in the morning, 
and the birch trees just green, is one of the 
most tender, fresh, and perfect expressions 
of first love, morning, spring, dew, and dawn 
in the world’s literature. His songs have 
inspired Tchaikovsky and other composers. 
The strongest and highest chord he struck is 
in his St. John Damascene; this contains 
a magnificent dirge for the dead which can 
bear comparison even with the Dies Ire 
for majesty, solemn pathos, and _ plangent 
rhythm. 

His pictures of landscapes have a peculiar 
charm. The following is an attempt at a 
translation— 


“Through the slush and the ruts of the 
highway, 
By the side of the dam of the stream, 
Where the fisherman’s nets are drying, 
The carriage jogs on, and I dream. 


I dream, and I look at the highway, 
At the sky that is sullen and grey, 


THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY 237 


At the lake with its shelving reaches, 
And the curling smoke far away. 


By the dam, with a cheerless visage 
Walks a Jew, who is ragged and sere. 
With a thunder of foam and of splashing, 

The waters race over the weir. 


A boy over there is whistling 
On a hemlock flute of his make; 

And the wild ducks get up in a panie 
And call as they sweep from the lake. 


And near the old mill some workmen 
Are sitting upon the green ground, 

With a wagon of sacks, a cart horse 
Plods past with a lazy sound. 


It all seems to me so familiar, 
Although I have never been here, 
The roof of that house out yonder, 
And the boy, and the wood, and the weir. 


And the voice of the grumbling mill-wheel, 
And that rickety barn, I know, 

I have been here and seen this already, 
And forgotten it all long ago. 


238 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


The very same horse here was dragging 
Those sacks with the very same sound, 
And those very same workmen were sitting 

By the rickety mill on the ground. ~ 


And that Jew, with his beard, walked past 
me, 
And those waters raced through the weir; 
Yes, all this has happened already, 
But I cannot tell when or where.” 


The people also produced a poet during 
this epoch and gave Koltsov a successor, in 
the person of Nixitin; his themes are taken 
straight from life, and he became known 
through his patriotic songs written during the 
Crimean War; but he is most successful in 
his descriptions of nature, of sunset on the 
fields, and dawn, and the swallow’s nest in 
the grumbling mill. Two other poets, whose 
work became well known later, but passed — 
absolutely unnoticed in the sixties, were 
SLUCHEVSKY, a philosophical poet, whose 
verse, excellent in description, suffers from 
clumsiness in form, and APUKHTIN, whose 
collected poems and ballads, although he 


THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY — 239 


began to write in 1859, were not published 
until 1886. Apukhtin is a Parnassian. The 
bulk of his work, though perfect in form, is 
uninteresting; but he wrote one or two lyrics 
which have a place in any Russian Golden 
Treasury, and his poems are largely read 
now. | 

In the eighties, a reaction against the anti- 
poetical tendency set in, and poets began to 
spring up like mushrooms. Of these, the 
most popular and the most remarkable is 
Napson (1862-87); he died when he was 
twenty-four, of consumption. Since then his 
verse has gone through twenty-one editions, 
and 110,000 copies have been sold; ten edi- 
tions were published in his own lifetime. And 
there are innumerable musical settings by 
various composers to his lyrics. His verse 
inaugurates a new epoch in Russian poetry, 
the distinguishing features of which are a 
great attention to form and technique, a 
Parnassian love of colour and shape, and a 
deep melancholy. 

Nadson sings the melancholy of youth, the 
dreams and disillusions of adolescence, and 
the hopelessness of the stagnant atmosphere 


240 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


of reaction to which he belonged. This last 
fact accounted in some measure for his 
extraordinary popularity. But it was by no 
means its sole cause ;. his verse is not only 
exquisite but magically musical, to an extent 
which makes the verse of other poets seem 
a stuff of coarser clay, and his pictures of 
nature, of spring, of night, and especially of 
night in the Riviera (with a note of pas- 
sionate home-sickness), have the aromatic, 
intoxicating sweetness of syringa. Verse such 
as this, sensitive, ultra-delicate, morbid, 
nervous, and pessimistic, is bound to have 
the defects of its qualities, in a marked de- 
gree; one is soon inclined to have enough 
of its sultry, oppressive atmosphere, its deli- 
cate perfume, its unrelieved gloom and its 
music, which is nearly always not only in 
a minor key but in the same key. Nobody 
was more keenly aware of this than Nadson 
himself, and one of his most beautiful poems © 
begins thus— 


** Dear friend, I know, I know, I only know 
too well 
That my verse is barren of all strength, and 
pale, and delicate, 


THE SECOND AGE OF POETRY 241 


And often just because of its debility I 
suffer 

And often weep in secret in the silence of 
the night.” 


And in another poem he writes his apology. 
He has never used verse as a toy to chase 
tedium; the blessed gift of the singer has 
often been to him an unbearable cross, and 
he has often vowed to keep silent; but, if 
the wind blows, the AXolian harp must needs 
respond, and streams of the hills cannot help 
rushing to the valley if the sun melts the snow 
on the mountain tops. This apologia more 
than all criticism defines his gift. His tem- 
perament is an Adolian harp, which, whether 
it will or no, is sensitive to the breeze; its 
strings are few, and tuned to one key; never- 
theless some of the strains it has sobbed have 
the stamp of permanence as well as that of 
ethereal magic. 

The poets that come after Nadson belong 
to the present day; there are many, and 
they increase in number every year. The so- 
called “‘ decadent ”’ school were influenced by 
Shelley, Verlaine, and the French symbolists ; 


but there is nothing which is decadent in the 
Q 


242 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


ordinary sense of the word in their verse. 
Their influence may not be lasting, but they 
are factors in Russian literature, and some 
of them, SoLocus, Brusov, BaLmont, and 
Ivanov, have produced work which any school 
would be glad to claim. This is also true of 
ALEXANDER Buiocu, one of the most original 
as well as one of the most exquisite of living 
Russian poets. 


CONCLUSION 


Wirth the death of Turgenev and Dostoyev- 
sky, the great epoch of Russian literature 
came to anend. A period of literary as well 
as of political stagnation began, which lasted 
until the Russo-Japanese War. This was 
followed by the revolutionary movement, 
which, in its turn, produced a literary as well 
as a political chaos, the effect of which and 
of the manifold reactions it brought about are 
still being felt. It was only natural, if one 
considers the extent and the quality of the 
productions of the preceding epoch, that the 
soil of literary Russia should require a rest. 

As it is, one can count the writers of 
prominence which the epoch of stagnation 
produced on one’s fingers—CHEKHOV, GARSHIN. 
KOROLENKO, and at the end of the period 
MAXIME Gorky, and apart from them, in a 
by-path of his own, MerezHKoysxy. Of 


these Chekhov and Gorky tower above the 
243 


244 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


others. Chekhov enlarged the range of Rus- 
sian literature by painting the middle-class 
and the Intelligentsia, and brought back to 
Russian literature the note of humour; and 
Gorky broke altogether fresh ground by paint- 
ing the vagabond, the artisan, the tramp, the 
thief, the flotsam and jetsam of the big town 
and the highway, and by painting in a new 
manner. 

Gorky’s work came like that of Mr. Rudyard 
Kipling to England, as a revelation. Not 
only did his subject matter open the doors 
on dominions undreamed of, but his attitude 
towards life and that of his heroes towards life 
seemed to be different from that of all Russian 
novelists before his advent ; and yet the differ- 
ence between him and his forerunners is not 
so great as it appears at first sight. It is 
true that his rough and rebellious heroes, in- 
stead of playing the Hamlet, or of finding the 
solution of life in charity and humility or sub- 
mission, are partisans of the survival of the 
fittest with a vengeance, the survival of the 
strongest fist and the sharpest knife; yet are 
these new heroes really so different from the 
uncompromising type that we have already 
seen sharing one half of the Russian stage, 


CONCLUSION 245 


right through the story of Russian literature, 
from Bazarov back to Peter the Great, and 
on whose existence was founded the remark 
that Peter the Great was one of the ingredients 
in the Russian character? Put Bazarov on the 
road, or Lermontov, or even Peter the Great, 
and you get Gorky’s barefooted hero. 

Where Gorky created something absolutely 
new was in the surroundings and in the man- 
ner of life which he described, and in the way 
he described them; this is especially true of 
his treatment of nature: for the first time in 
Russian prose literature, we get away from 
the “orthodox” landscape of convention, 
and we are face to face with the elements. 
We feel as if a new breath of air had entered 
into literature; we feel as people accustomed 
to the manner in which the poets treated 
nature in England in the eighteenth century 
must have felt when Wordsworth, Byron, 
Shelley and Coleridge began to write. 

Chekhov worked on older lines. He de- 
scends directly from Turgenev, although his 
field is a different one. He, more than any 
other writer and better than any other writer, 
painted the epoch of stagnation, when Russia, 
as a Russian once said, was playing itself to 


246 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


death at vindt (an older form of Bridge). 
The tone of his work is grey, and indeed 
resembles, as Tolstoy said, that of a photo- 
grapher, by its objective realism as well as by 
its absence of high tones; yet if Chekhov is a 
photographer, he is at the same time a supreme 
artist, an artist in black and white, and his 
pessimism is counteracted by two other fac- 
tors, his sense of humour and his humanity ; 
were it not so, the impression of sadness one 
would derive from the sum of misery which 
his crowded stage of merchants, students, 
squires, innkeepers, waiters, schoolmasters, 
magistrates, popes, officials, make up between 
them, would be intolerable. Some of Chek- 
hov’s most interesting work was written for 
the stage, on which he also brought Scenes of 
Country Life, which is the sub-title of the play 
Uncle Vanya. 'There are the same grey tints, 
the same weary, amiable, and slack people, 
bankrupt of ideals and poor in hope, whom we | 
meet in the stories; and here, too, behind 
the sordid triviality and futility, we hear 
the “still sad music of humanity.” But 
in order that the tints of Chekhov’s delicate 
living and breathing photographs can be effec- 
tive on the stage, very special acting is neces- 


CONCLUSION 247 


sary, in order to convey the quality of atmo- 
sphere which is his special gift. Fortunately 
he met with exactly the right technique and 
the appropriate treatment at the Art Theatre 
at Moscow. 

Chekhov died in 1904, soon after the Russo- 
Japanese War had begun. Apart from the 
main stream and tradition of Russian fiction 
and Russian prose, Merezhkovsky occupies a 
unique place, a place which lies between 
criticism and imaginative historical fiction, 
not unlike, in some respects—but very different 
in others—that which is occupied by Walter 
Pater in English fiction. His best known 
work, at least his best known work in Europe, 
is a prose trilogy, ‘“‘ The Death of the Gods ” 
(a study of Julian the apostate), ‘“‘ The 
Resurrection of the Gods” (the story of 
Leonardo da Vinci), and “‘ The Antichrist ” (the 
story of Peter the Great and his son Alexis), 
which has been translated into nearly every 
European language. This trilogy is an essay 
in imaginative historical reconstitution; it 
testifies to a real and deep culture, and it is 
lit at times by flashes of imaginative inspira- 
tion which make the scenes of the past live; 
it is alive with suggestive thought; but it is 


248 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


not throughout convincing, there is a touch 
of Bulwer Lytton as well as a touch of Goethe 
and Pater init. Merezhkovsky is perhaps more 
successful in his purely critical work, his books 
on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gogol, which 
are infinitely stimulating, suggestive, and 
original, than in his historical fiction, although, 
needless to say, his criticism appeals to a far 
narrower public. He is in any case one of 
the most brilliant and interesting of Russian 
modern writers, and perhaps the best known 
outside Russia. 

During the war, a writer of fiction made his 
name by a remarkable book, namely Kuprin, 
who in his novel, The Duel, gave a vivid and 
masterly picture of the life of an officer in 
the line. Kuprin has since kept the promise 
of his early work. At the same time, Leontp 
ANDREEV came forward with short stories, 
plays, a description of war (The Red Laugh), 
moralities, not uninfluenced by Maeterlinck, © 
and a limpid and beautiful style in which 
pessimism seemed to be speaking its last 
word. 

In 1905 the revolutionary movement broke 
out, with its great hopes, its disillusions, its 
period of anarchy on the one hand and repres- 


CONCLUSION 249 


sion on the other; out of the chaos of events 
came achaos of writing rather than literature, 
and in its turn this produced, in literature 
as well as in life, a reaction, or rather a series 
of reactions, towards symbolism, szstheticism, 
mysticism on the one hand, and towards 
materialism—not of theory but of practice—on 
the other. But since these various reactions 
are now going on, and are vitally affecting 
the present day, the revolutionary movement 
of 1905 seems the right point to take leave 
of Russian literature. In 1905 a new era 
began, and what that era will ultimately 
produce, it is too soon even to hazard a 
guess. 

Looking back over the record of Russian 
literature, the first thing which must strike 
us, if we think of the literature of other 
countries, is its comparatively short life. 
There is in Russian literature no Middle Ages, 
no Villon, no Dante, no Chaucer, no Renais- 
sance, no Grand Stécle. Literature begins 
in the nineteenth century. The second thing 
which will perhaps strike us is that, in spite 
of its being the youngest of all the litera- 
tures, it seems to be spiritually the oldest. 
In some respects it seems to have become 


250 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


over-ripe before it reached maturity. But 
herein, perhaps, lies the secret of its greatness, 
and this may be the value of its contribution 
to the soul of mankind. It is— 


** Old in grief and very wise in tears ”’: 


and its chief gift to mankind is an expression, 
made with a naturalness and sincerity that 
are matchless, and a love of reality which is 
unique,—for all Russian literature, whether 
in prose or verse, is rooted in reality—of that 
grief and that wisdom; the grief and wisdom 
which come from a great heart; a heart that 
is large enough to embrace the world and to 
drown all the sorrows therein with the im- 
mensity of its sympathy, its fraternity, its 
pity, its charity, and its love. 


1113. 
1692. 


1703. 
1725. 


1744. 
1750. 
1755. 
1762. 
1765. 
a L790. 
1796. 
1800. 


1802. 


~~ 1806. 
1816. 


~~ 1819. 
_.. 1820. 
1823. 


~ 1895. 


CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 


The Chronicle of Nestor. 

First play produced in Russia, Gregory. 

Simon Polotsky’s The Prodigal Son acted. 

The first Russian newspaper, Zhe Russian News, 
appears. 

Death of Peter the Great. 

Foundation of the Academy of Science. 

Death of Kantemir. 

Death of Tatishchev. 

University of Moscow founded. 

Accession of Catherine the Great. 

Death of Lomonosov. chet 

Radishchev’s Journey Through Russia published. 

Death of Catherine the Great. 

First edition of T’he Story of the Raid of Prince Igor 
published. 

Zhukovsky translates Gray’s Hlegy. 

Death of Radishchev. 

Krylov’s first fables published. 

Death of Derzhavin. 

History of the Russian State, by Karamzin, published. 

University of St. Petersburg founded. 

Pushkin’s Ruslan and Ludmila published. 

Griboyedov’s Misfortune of Being Clever circulated. 

First Canto of Eugene Onegin published. 

The Decembrist Attempt. 

251 


252 RUSSIAN LITERATURE 


1826 Rileev hanged. 
Death of Karamzin. 
-1827. Pushkin’s Gypsies published. 
1829. Death of Griboyedov. 
Pushkin’s Poltava published. 
1831. Pushkin’s Boris Godunov published. 
Complete version of Hugene Onegin published. 
1832. Gogol’s Hvening on the Farm near the Dikanka published. 
1834. Gogol’s Mirgorod published. 
- 1835. Gogol’s Revisor produced on the stage. 
1836. Chaadaev’s letters published. 
1837. Death of Pushkin. 
1841. Death of Lermontov. 
1842. Death of Koltsov. 
Gogol’s Dead Souls published. 
1844. Death of Krylov. 
1847. Gogol’s correspondence published. 
Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches published. 
Death of Belinsky. 
1849. Dostoyevsky imprisoned. 
1856-7. Saltykov’s Government Sketches appear. 
1859. Ostrovsky’s Storm produced. 
Goncharov’s Oblomov published. 
1860. Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons published. 
1861. Emancipation of the Serfs. 
1862. Pisemsky’s T'roubled Sea published. 
1863. Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? published. 
1865. Leskov’s No Way Out published. 
» 1865-1872. Tolstoy’s War and Peace appeared. 


~~ 1866. Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment published. 


1868. Dostoyevsky’s Idiot published. 

1875. Death of Count Alexis Tolstoy. 

~ 1875-6. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina published. 
1877. Death of Nekrasov. 

1881. Death of Dostoyevsky. 

1883. Death of Turgenev. 

1886. Death of Ostrovsky. 


1887. 
1889. 
1900. 
- 1904, 


1910. 


CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 


Death of Nadson. 
Death of Saltykov. 
Death of Soloviev. 


Production of Chekhovw’s Chaika (Seagull). 


Production of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard. 
Death of Chekhov. 
Death of Tolstoy. 


2538 


INDEX 


AoTOoN, LORD, 146 

Ainsworth, Harrison, 82 
Aksakov, Ivan, 154 

——, Serge, 154 f. 

Alexander I, 9, 80f., 44, 124, 169 
— IT, 52, 153, 160, 179, 327 
Alexis, Tsar, 23° 

Andreev, Leonid, 248 

Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’ 8, 205 f. 
Apukhtin, 238 

Arnold, Matthew, 123, 146, 226 
Atheism and Socialism, 150 f. 


Bakunin, aa ay 

Balfour, Mr. A. J,, 182 

Balmont, 242 — 

Bariatinsky, Ene, 101 

Batyushkov, 5 

Baudelaire, 226 

Beaconsfield, Lord, 146 

Belinsky, 142, 150 

Bell, The, Herzen edits, 151, 153, 
180 


Bloch, Alexander, 242 
Bogoiskateli, 198, 199 

Bronté, Sete 222 

, Emily, 

Briickner, Tprot, 144, 145, 147, 


Rint 242 

Bulgaria, 12 

Bulgaria, liberation of, 170, 171 

Biirger’s Leonore translated into 
Russian, 52 

Burns, Boren 125 

Byron, 61 f., 66, 67, 71, 72 
Npegae pte 73, 98, 119, 123, 

4 
Byzantium, Emperor of, 11 


Catherine I, 18 (footnote) 
— II, 27, 32, 38, 80, 155 
Chaadaev, 148 
Chekhov, 243, 244 f. 
Chernyshevsky, 180, 181, 227 
Chesterton, Mr. G. Ke 182 
Christianity of the East, aia 
Chronicle of Kiev, the, 15 f. 
Chronicle of Nestor, the, 15 f. 
Church, the, influence on Russia 
literature, 11, 21 
Constantine, 44 





54 


Corot, 226 
Crabbe, Nekrasov and, 229f. 
Crimean War, the, 160, 202, 238 


Danilevsky, 180 

Daudet, 172 

“ Decembrist ” rising, the, 44, 
45, 61, 92 

Delvig, Baron, 101 

Demetrius, 21, 67 

Derzhavin, 29, 56 

Diderot, 27 

Dobrolyubov, 180, 181, 227 

Donne, John, 97 

Dostoyevsky, 96, 99, 109, 143, 
145, 160, 161, 164, 167, 173, 
180, 192, 196 f., 200, 210 £5 
220 £. 


Eastern and Western Churches, 
schism of, 13, 22, 182, 183 

Eliot, Sir Charles, 13 

Elizabeth, Empress, 26 

Emancipation of the serfs, the, 
160, 227 


Falconet’s equestrian statue of 
peter rhe reat, 85 

Fet, 2: 

Abert 162, 204 

French influence in Russia, 26 

Eras Revolution, the, 27, 40, 


Gagarin, Prince, 150 

Garshin, 243 

Gautier, 226 

German influence in Russia, 26 

Goethe, death of, 228 

[soa eae resemblance to 

Gogol, Nicholas, 126 f., 190 

Goncharov, 143, 176 f 

Gorky, Maxime, 164, 243, 244 f. 

Gray’s Elegy, ‘Russian transla- 
tions of, 52, 53 

Gregory, Protestant pastor of the 
Sloboda, 23 

Griboyedov, eae 126, 191 

Grigoriev, 179, 1 30 

Grigorovich, 194, 195 

Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 84 


INDEX 


Haumant, M., 168 

Heckeren-Dantes’ 
Pushkin 90 

Heine, 98 

Here Alexander, 148, 150f., 
1 


Hoffmann, 127 
Homyakoy, 154 
Hugo, Victor, 117, 118, 172 


Ivan ITI, 20, 21, 24 

—— IV (“The Terrible ”), 24, 
67, 235 

Ivanov, 242 


Jane Eyre cited, 222 


Kantemir, Prince, 27 

Karakozov, 153 

Karamzin, 18, 32f., 141 

Katkov, 180, 182 

Keats, 146 

Kidnapped (Stevenson’s), 129 

Kiev, destruction of, 19; rebuild- 
ing of, 21 

—,the mother of Russian 
culture, 10 f. 

Kipling, Mr. Rudyard, 244 

Koltsov, 124f 

Korolenko, 243 

Krylov, 34f., 176 f. 

Kuprin, 248 


duel with 


La Fontaine, 35 f. 

Lang, Andrew, 128 

Latin language taught in Mos- 
cow, 22 

Le Maistre, Joseph, 148, 149 

Leo X, 13 


Lermontov, 102 f., 126 

Leskov, vi, 189 f. 

Lisle, Leconte de, 226 

Literary criticism, 141 
Liturgical books, revision of, 22 
Lomonosov, Michael, 26, 29 
Luther, 13 

Lytton, Bulwer, 248 


Maikov, 232 

Maupassant, 128, 172 

Meredith, George, 169, 172 
erg a 147, 205, 243 


Mérimée, 83, 141 

Mill, John Stuart, 181 
Mickiewicz, the Pole, 87 
Montesquieu, 27 
Morley, John, 146 
Moscow, 10, 19, 21 


255 


Moscow Art Theatre, the, v, 221, 
222, 247 

——., European culture in, 23 

Moscow Journal founded by Ka- 
ramzin, 32 

Moscow, Pushkin’s memorial at 
99, 220 

——,, schools in, 22 

——,, the fire of, 18 

, University of, 26 

More of Russian literature, the, 

Musin-Pushkin, Count. See Push- 


kin. 
Musset, 118, 119 
Mussorgsky, 67 


Nadson, 2389 f. 

Napoleon, 30 f., 40, 111, 204 

Nechaev, 218 

Nekrasov, 229 f., 234 

Nicholas, 44 

Nicholas, Emperor, 160 

Nicholas I, 103 

Nihilism, 152, 163, 171, 173, 179, 
217, 218, 227 

Nikitin, 238 

Norsemen in Russia, 10 





Mg bad the, Russian translation 
ot, 
Ostrovsky, 193 f. 


Paleologa, Sophia, 21 
Paris revolution of 1848, the, 159 
hood apatite poetry, the epoch of, 


26 f. 
Pater, Walter, 247, 248 
Paul, Emperor, 33 
Peter the Great, 21, 24 f., 71, 85, 


97 
— of Poetry, the, 95 
Petrashevsky and his followers, 
159, 160 
Pisarev, 180, 181, 227 
Pisemsky, 191, 193 
Poe, E. A., 86 
Poland, 21, 24 
Poland, the rising in, 180 
Poles occupy Moscow, 24 
Polevoy, 142 
Polezhaev, 101 
Polonsky, 232, 233 f. 
Polotsky, Simeon, 22 f. 
Preobrazhenskoe and its theatre, 


23 
Pre-Raphaelites, the, 226 
Printing press, the first, 21 
Propagandists of Western Ideas, 
the, 148 f. 





256 


Prutkov, Kusama. See Tolstoy, 
Count Alexis. 


Pugachev and the Cossack rising, 
80 


Pushkin vi, 18, 34, 41, 43, 50, 
54f., 109, 110, 123, 126, 132, 
135, 138, 143 162, 167, 220 


Radishchev, 27 f. 

Rakhmaninov, 81 

Rimsky-Korsakov, 81 

Rodionovna, Anna, 84, 85 

Rome, Gogol settles in, 133 

Rousseau, 27 ‘ 

Russia and political liberty, 148 

, Norsemen in, 10, 11 

, Tartar invasion of, 19, 24 

—, the revolutionary move- 
ment of 1905, 243, 248, 249 

Russian literature, beginnings 
of, 9 f. 

——,, dawn of, 30f. 

, second renascence of, 











159 
—— ——, the age of prose, 126f. 
, the second age of 
poetry, 226 f. 
— newspaper, the first, 25 
— Nihilism. See Nihilism. 
—— trade centres, 10 
Russia’s national poet, 95 
Russo-Japanese War, the, 243 
Ryleev, 44 . 


Sainte-Beuve, 146 

St. Petersburg, 10 

Jesuits, the, 148 

——., the great floods of 1834, 85 
a Pane Michael, vi, 184 7., 


Sand, George, 162 

Schiller’s Maid of Orleans, Rus- 
sian translation of, 52 

Schumann of Russian literature, 
the, 175 

Seekers after God, 198 

pee emancipation of the, 160, 


Shakespeare, Pushkin on, 65, 66 

Shchedrin. See Saltykov. 

Siberia, Dostoyevsky at, 160 
213, 225 

——,, Radishchev at, 28 

Slav race, the, 10 f. 

Slayoule liturgy, introduction of, 


Slavophiles, the, 148, 148, 152, 
154, 159, 180, 228 
Sluchevsky, 238 











INDEX 


Socialism and Atheism, 150 f. 
Society of Welfare, the, 43 
Sologub, 242 

Soloviev, Vladimir, 11, 93, 181 f. 
Stebnitsky. See Leskov. 
Stendhal, 204 

peveueous R. L., 127, 128, 129 


Strakhov, 180 
Suffragettes, 163, 164 
Sully-Prudhomme, 226 
Suvorov, 30 
Sviatoslav, 15, 16 


Taine, 162 
Tartar invasion of Russia, the, 
; the Tartar yoke thrown off, 


Tatishchev, 26 

Tchaikovsky, 80, 236 

Tennyson, Lord, 165, 166, 226 

Thackeray, 172 

Tolstoy, Count Alexis, 234 f. 

, Count Leo, 134, 161, 164 
170, 196 f., 211, 246 

Turgenev, Ivan, 64, 161 f., 192 

Tyutchev, 154, 228 


Universal church, 
views on, 182-183 
University of Moscow, the, 26, 251 





Soloviev’s 


Venevitinov, 101 

Vienna, Congress of, 40, 43 
Vigny, Alfred de, 202 

Vinci, Leonardo da, 67 

Virgil of Russian prose, the, 175 
Vladimir, Prince of Kiev, 11 
Volkonskyv, Princess, 150 
Voltaire, 27 

Volynsky, 147 

ee Saltykov banished to 


Vyazemsky, Prince, 141 
Rein Peace, publication of 
Wells, Mr., 164 


Wilson, John, 81 
Woman’s Suffrage, 182. C7. Suf- 


fragettes. 
Wordsworth, 120, 123 
Yakovlev. Of. Herzen, Alex- 
ander. 


Yazykov, 101 
Zhukovsky, Basil, 51 f., 83 


. Zola, 74, 204 








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Cambridge. 


44, Buddhism. 


By Mrs. Ruys Dayips, Lecturer on Indian Philosophy, Manchester. 


46. English Sects: A History of Nonconformity. 


By W. B. Sexzie, Principal of Manchester College, Oxford. 
60. Comparative Religion. 


By Pror, J. Esttin Carpenter. “One of the few authorities on this 
subject compares all the religions to see what they have to offer on 
the great themes of religion.”—Christian Work and Evangelist, 


88. Religious Development Between Old and New 
Testaments. 


By R. H. Cwarres, Canon of Westminster. Shows how religious 
and ethical thought between 180 B. C. and 100 A. D. grew naturally 
into that of the New Testament. 


LITERATURE AND ART 
73. Euripides and His Age. 


By Gitserrt Murray, Regius Professor of Greek, Oxford. Brings 
before the reader an undisputedly great poet and thinker, an amaz- 
ingly successful playwright, and a figure of high significance in the 
history of humanity. 


81. Chaucer and His Times. 


By Grace E.: Hapvow, Lecturer Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; Late 
Reader, Bryn Mawr. 


70. Ancient Art and Ritual. 
By Jane E. Harrison, LL. D., D. Litt. “One of the 100 most im- 
portant books of 1913.”—New York Times Review. 

61. The Victorian Age in Literature. 


By G. K. Cnesterton. The most powerfully sustained and brilliant 
piece of writing Mr. Chesterton has yet published. é 


59. Dr. Johnson and His Circle. 


By Joun Bartry. Johnson’s life, character, works, and friendships 
are surveyed; and there is a notable vindication of the “Genius of 
Boswell.” 

58. The Newspaper. “7 
By G. Binney Diestr. The first full account, from the inside, of 
newspaper organization as it exists to-day. 

62. Painters and Painting. 


By Srr Frepertck Wepmore. With 16 half-tone illustrations. 
64. The Literature of Germany. 
By J. G. Roserrson, 


48. Great Writers of America. 


By W. P. Trent and Joun Erskine, of Columbia University. 


87. The Renaissance. 
By Epirn Sicwet, author of Catherine de Medici, Men and Women 
of the French Renaissance. 





40. The English Language. 


By L. P. SmirH. A concise history of the origin and development 
of, the English language. 


45. Medieval English Literature. 


By W. P. Ker, Professor of English Literature, University College, 
London. ‘‘One of the soundest scholars. His style is effective, sim- 
ple, yet never dry.”—The Athenaeum. ‘ 


89. Elizabethan Literature. 


By J M. Rosertson, M.-P., author of ‘Montaigne and Shake- 
speare,” ‘‘Modern Humanists.”’ ; 


27. Modern English Literature. 


By G. H. Matr. From Wyatt and Surrey to Synge and Yeats. “A 
most suggestive book, one of the best of this great series,’’—Chicago 
Evening Post. 


2. Shakespeare. 


By Joun Masertretp. ‘“‘One of the very few indispensable adjuncts 
to a Shakespearean Library.”—Boston Transcript. 


31. Landmarks in French Literature. 


By G. L. Srracuey, Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. “For a 
survey of the outstanding figures of French literature with an acute 
analysis of the contribution which each made to his time and to the 
general mass there has been no book as yet published so judicially 
interesting.’”—The Chautauquan. 


38. Architecture. 


By Pror. W. R. Leruasy. An introduction to the history and 
theory of the art of building. ‘‘Professor Lethaby’s scholarship and 
extraordinary knowledge of the most recent discoveries of archzxa- 
logical research provide the reader with a new outlook and with new 
facts.’—The Athenaeum. 


66. Writing English Prose. 


By Witttam T. Brewster, Professor of English, Columbia Univer- 
sity. ‘“‘Should be put into the hands of every man who is beginning 
to write and of every teacher of English that has brains enough to 
understand sense.”’—New York Sun, 


83. William Morris: His Work and Influence. 


By A. Cruttron Brock, author of Shelley: The Man and the Poet. 
William Morris believed that the artist should toil for love of his 
work rather than the gain of his employer, and so he turned from 
making works of art to remaking society. 


OTHER VOLUMES IN PREPARATION. 


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